Bob Hallett tells of a review of a recent Great Big Sea show where the writer referred to the song The Old Black Rum as a traditional Maritime favourite.

Odd, he thought -- considering he wrote it only a decade ago.

But such is the stature of the Newfoundland act, and such is the style of their writing that, in their homeland especially, their songs have been absorbed into its culture and seem as though they've been around forever.

"These songs -- so many other bands play them and so many people sing them in pubs -- they've taken on a life of their own," says Hallett, who was in town with bandmate Alan Doyle recently on a promotional tour. "It's kind of amazing."

Doyle agrees.

"It's quite a feeling of satisfaction to write a song and hear it on radio, or have it do well -- that's a rush and that's a good thing," he says, sipping on a pint of Guinness.

"But even greater ... to have actually written a song that has made its way to the pub canon -- that's huge.

"That's some serious company to be keeping."

It's that company Great Big Sea honour on their latest release The Hard and The Easy, an album of all traditional material from The Rock. The 12 tracks, recorded over the course of a year in between tours and other projects, represent to the band the true spirit of the land and its people, and all of them were chosen because of their "bring it to the party" appeal.

Consequently, there's a great deal of diversity in tempo and subject matter -- some of the songs are in the aural folklore tradition, telling real stories, such as Concerning Charlie Horse and Captain Kidd, and others just being a good bit of fun.

One of the best from the latter group -- and sure to be a live GBS favourite when they hit the road early next year -- is The Mermaid, a dirty sea ditty, which was the drunken trademark of harbour master they knew.

"That's the folk tradition live and well, that is," says Doyle, noting the band had to track their friend down in Southeast Asia and have him sing it into Doyle's answering machine so they had a record of it.

"We haven't met a single soul who's ever heard that song. He doesn't know where he heard it -- he can't remember."

"And I looked a lot," Hallett says. "I did a lot of folklore in university so I know where to go to find these things and I can't find any record of it anywhere."

"It's not unusual for songs to be like that," Doyle says.

"In Newfoundland, in the canon if you will, there's a hundred or so songs ... that just about everybody knows -- you can pick 10 people off the street in Newfoundland and seven or eight of them can sing from beginning to end those songs.

"But other ones, like The Mermaid, for example, there's probably a dozen people in Newfoundland who know those songs, who've never met.

"It was an intentional thing that we wanted to represent those two sources of music in Newfoundland ..."

And, again, it was important to GBS to not take an uptight approach to the songs thereby making it, as Hallett says, an "academic study."

In fact, they approached The Hard and the Easy as they did any of the other Great Big Sea records, which means it should appeal to the many, many fans of their previous seven releases.

"The worst thing you can do with folk music is make it important or necessary," says Hallett, "and try to serve it to people like porridge -- 'It's good for you. It's boring and you're not going to like it much, but it's good for you.'

"We're just trying to make the stuff entertaining."

But as Doyle says, that doesn't mean the band members don't understand the importance of what they've done, which, in some cases, means providing the first ever recordings of songs that stretch back generations and centuries.

"It's quite a rush to think that there's a little slice of Newfoundlandia that's alive and well because of us," he says.