Daron Letts
Special to Northern News Services

Yellowknife (June 01/05) - As an artist, Moira Cameron combines the skills of the musician, the storyteller, the actor and the historian. She is a balladeer.

During the first storytelling festival in Yellowknife last weekend, Cameron treated a NACC audience to all her skills with three traditional ballads sung a cappella.

Moira Cameron sings a ballad and strums an Appalachian dulcimer during an afternoon workshop organized as part of NACC's Festival of Stories.

The response from the audience suggests there's an appetite for more.

Cameron brought her love of balladry to Yellowknife 15 years ago. She grew up in Toronto listening to her late father, the folk singer Stewart Cameron, singing traditional ballads from his native Scotland. Balladry became her passion and her life's work.

Cameron released two solo albums from Yellowknife and performs ballads at storytelling festivals and conferences across Canada.

She presented a workshop on the history and tradition of ballads during the weekend's storytelling festival.

A ballad is a narrative song comprised of compact stanzas and often a refrain, she says. As a poetic form, the ballad stretches back to the late Middle Ages in Europe.

Travelling minstrels used ballads to spread news of the day while enchanting listeners with lyrical tales of elves, knights, pirates, sex and murder.

Beyond mere entertainment, the ballad was a vessel for social critique and moral instruction.

Another kind of balladeer, long overlooked by modern folklorists, was the medieval mother and wife.

Hundreds of years before the workaday diversions of radio and television, women combined "the fantastical and the practical" by singing ballads while labouring in the home or field.

Many of the old ballads Cameron sings tell timeless stories from a woman's point of view. She says she is inspired in her own life by the endurance and strength of the women in her favourite ballads.

"When I'm singing a ballad I slip into another realm," says Cameron. "I'm transported into the story."

By immersing herself in the story she's telling through song, Cameron says she becomes almost like a method actor. Just as an actor must convey character and emotion from the confines of a script, so too must the balladeer convey complex expression from the confines of a few simple lyrics.

That the ballad has endured for so long is testament to its beauty as a storytelling medium, says Cameron. She describes the ballad as a "living archive" of human emotion that reaches deeper than even today's rap or country music. "The vast range of human experience that ballads cover is what makes them so special," she says. "I have hundreds of ballads in my repertoire and I've only skimmed the surface. I'm still coming across ballads I've never heard and want to learn."

Over the past decade, Cameron has written a handful of original ballads. Though she composes in the traditional style, her themes are contemporary.

The first ballad Cameron wrote spins a cautionary tale of violence against women in Yellowknife that is based on an incident involving a friend. Another of her ballads chronicles the aftermath of the Giant Mine disaster.

True to the spirit of oral tradition however, Cameron says she prefers singing the centuries old ballads that have no copyright.

"It's the biggest compliment to me when someone wants to learn a ballad they've heard me sing in order to pass it on in their own voice," she says. "That's how the tradition continues."

Cameron hopes the tradition of an annual storytelling festival in Yellowknife continues far into the future. She says she will continue organizing storytelling ceilidhs and networking with other storytellers while working on her third album of ballads in an effort to help make that happen.