William Roy MacKenzie was a Canadian folklorist and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 who collected songs and ballads in Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia

Nova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...

 in the early 20th century.

Influence of Francis Child

While at Harvard, MacKenzie was among members of an increasingly prominent group of English professors influenced by the work of Francis Child

Francis James Child

Francis James Child was an American scholar, educator, and folklorist, best known today for his collection of folk songs known as the Child Ballads. Child was Boylston professor of rhetoric and oratory at Harvard University, where he produced influential editions of English poetry...

, an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 folklorist who collected what is now known as the Child Ballads

Child Ballads

The Child Ballads are a collection of 305 ballads from England and Scotland, and their American variants, collected by Francis James Child in the late nineteenth century...

.

Song collecting in Nova Scotia

MacKenzie was the first of several people to collect songs in Nova Scotia, and his Ballads and Sea Songs remains an important collection of the province's traditional music

Traditional music

Traditional music is the term increasingly used for folk music that is not contemporary folk music. More on this is at the terminology section of the World music article...

. In his introduction to MacKenzie's 1909 article in the Journal of American Folklore

Journal of American Folklore

The Journal of American Folklore is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Folklore Society. Since 2003 this has been done on its behalf by the University of Illinois Press. The journal has been published since the society's founding in 1888. It publishes on a quarterly schedule...

, Kittredge noted that

"The conditions in Nova Scotia have been such as to
render the evidence which [MacKenzie] has collected highly typical. Several processes which we are
often obliged to infer or to conjecture with respect to the course of tradition through long
periods of time, have there gone on with such rapidity that their history may be followed
by means of the recollection of living persons."

His work influenced Helen Creighton

Helen Creighton

Mary Helen Creighton, CM was a prominent Canadian folklorist. She collected over 4,000 traditional songs, stories, and myths in a career that spanned several decades, and she published many books and articles on Nova Scotia folk songs and folklore...

, one of Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

's most prolific song collectors. MacKenzie and Creighton are the most prominent collectors of Nova Scotia traditional songs, but others, such as Louise Manny

Louise Manny

Louise Elizabeth Manny was a New Brunswick folklorist and historian. She was born in Gilead, Maine but her family moved to New Brunswick when she was three...

, collected songs in the province as well.