Larena Clark

LaRena LeBarr Clark (November 21, 1904 – May 3, 1991) was one of Canada’s most remarkable bearers of traditional song, carrying an inherited repertoire that reached back centuries while remaining deeply rooted in the life and work of rural Ontario. Born at LeBarr Landing near Lake Simcoe, Ontario, she was of French, English, and Irish ancestry. Her family’s livelihood—hunting, trapping, boat-building—kept them moving through northern Ontario communities, where songs were learned not from books or broadcasts but from memory, shared at home or among neighbours.

From her father, Joseph LeBarr, her mother Mary Frances Watson, and her grandparents, Clark absorbed a wide range of material: centuries-old British and Irish ballads, French-Canadian chansons, sea shanties, music hall pieces, humorous local verses, lumbering songs, and cowboy ballads picked up from workers in Ontario’s bush camps. By the time collectors began to take notice of her in the early 1960s, her repertoire was one of the largest and most varied of any traditional singer documented in Canada.

Folklorist Edith Fowke recorded her extensively, publishing many of the songs in landmark anthologies and featuring them on the 1965 Topic Records LP A Canadian Garland. Clark’s singing—clear, unhurried, and faithful to the versions she had learned—offered an unbroken link to oral tradition. She was equally at home with tragic narrative ballads like “Lord Gregory” or “The Flying Cloud” as she was with comic pieces such as “The Faggot Cutter” or local compositions about logging mishaps and small-town characters.

Festival appearances in Canada and the United States soon followed, along with radio broadcasts and concert programs that brought her songs to new audiences. After settling in Hawkstone, near Barrie, Ontario, in 1975, she took the unusual step—rare for a traditional singer—of founding her own label, Clark Records. Over the next decade she released nine LPs, documenting hundreds of songs from her repertoire. Each album, often accompanied by detailed notes, reflected her belief that these songs were part of a shared cultural inheritance, deserving preservation and respect.

Her later records, including Canada’s Traditional Queen of Song and A Family Heritage, continued to blend songs of British Isles origin with material shaped in Canadian settings: Great Lakes shipwreck ballads, Ontario lumber camp songs, and sentimental parlour pieces popular in rural homes. In 1987, her contributions to preserving Canada’s musical heritage were recognized with the Marius Barbeau Medal from the Folklore Studies Association of Canada.

LaRena Clark remained active as a performer, teacher, and recording artist into her eighties, working closely with folklorists, musicians, and community groups to pass her songs along. She died in Orillia, Ontario, in 1991, the same year her biography A Family Heritage: LaRena Clark’s Story and Songs—a collaboration between Edith Fowke and Jay Rahn—was published.

Today, her voice endures on field recordings, commercial albums, and in the repertoires of singers who learned from her. In the words of one admirer, LaRena Clark “sang the old songs as if they were still being lived.” She remains a touchstone for anyone seeking the sound of Canada’s living folk tradition.
-Robert Williston