22 May

Lost Jimmie Whalen

Slowly and sadly I strayed by the river,
A-watching the sunbeams as evening drew nigh,
All alone as I rambled I spied a fair damsel,
She was weeping and wailing with many a sigh.

Sighing for one who is now lying lonely,
Mourning for one who no mortal can save,
As the dark foaming waters flow sadly around her,
As onward they roll o’er young Jimmie’s grave.

“Jimmie,” said she, “won’t you come to my arms,
And give me sweet kisses as oft times you gave?
You promised you’d meet me this evening my darling,
O come dearest Jimmie, love, come from the grave!”

Slowly there rose from the depths of the river,
A vision of beauty far fairer than sun,
While red robes of crimson encircled around him,
Unto this fair maiden to speak he’s begun.

“Why did you rise me from the realms of glory,
Back to this place where I once had to leave?
To clasp you once more in my fond loving arms?
To see you once more I have come from my grave.”

“Jimmie” said she, “why not stay on earth with me,
Don’t leave me here for to weep and to rave,
But if you won’t mind me and bide here beside me,
Oh Jimmy take me to your cold silent grave.”

“Darling to me you are asking a favor
That no earthy mortal can grant unto thee.
For death is the dagger that holds us asunder,
And wide is the gulf, love, between you and me.”

“One fond embrace, love, and then I must leave you
One loving kiss, pet, and then we must part.”
And cold were the arms he encircled around her,
While cold was the bosom she pressed to her heart.

Then straightway the vision did vanish before her,
Straightway to the sky he then seemed to go,
Leaving his loved one distracted and lonely,
Weeping and wailing in sadness and woe.

Throwing herself on the banks of the river,
Weeping and wailing her poor heart would break,
Sighing “My loved one, my lost Jimmie Whalen,
I will lie down and die by the side of your grave.”

Norah Rendell and I have been singing this beautiful song for several years but somehow it has never made it onto Northwoods Songs!

It is one of two songs that commemorate the tragic drowning of a raftsman named James Phalen around 1878 in Ontario. Collector Franz Rickaby, who prints both songs in his book Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy, corresponded with multiple informants who knew the details of the Phalen drowning. It happened at King’s Chute on Ontario’s Mississippi River–a tributary of the Ottawa where the rafting crew was working for a boss named Peter McLaren who went on to be a senator. Phalen and two others were attempting to break a log jam at the “Upper Falls” section of the Chute. Phalen fell in and was swept under the logs.  

Rickaby’s informants told him that the other popular “Whalen” song, “Jim Whalen,” was definitely based on the Phalen tragedy (apparently the name was pronounced “Whalen” in that part of Ontario). They said it was written and sung “with much pathos” by a local songsmith in Lanark, Ontario named John Smith.

Rickaby was not certain that the ghost-visiting narrative of “Lost Jimmie Whalen” referred to the same drowning victim as the more journalistic “Jim Whalen.” Rickaby collected only a three verse fragment “Lost Jimmie Whalen” from Will Daugherty of Charlevoix, Michigan in 1919. A version collected in the 1950s in Ontario from Martin Sullivan by Edith Fowke clearly makes the Phalen connection by including an additional verse:

“Hard, hard were the struggles on the cruel Mississippi,
But encircled around her on every side,
Thinking of you as we conquered them bravely,
I was hoping some day for to make you my bride.”

The above-transcribed melody comes from yet another Great Lakes region singer named Robert Walker who lived in Crandon, Wisconsin (Walker’s version appears on this wonderful Folkways album). Walker’s melody, a relative of the one frequently used for “Lass of Glenshee,” is similar to that used by Sullivan but I prefer the way Walker sings the opening bar. The text above is primarily from Walker with a few lines borrowed from the Daugherty and Sullivan versions and a couple changed of my own in the sixth stanza.

04 Feb

We Are Anchored by the Roadside, Jim

We Are Anchored By the Roadside Jim

We are anchored by the roadside, Jim, as we’ve oft-times been before,
When you and I were weary from sacking on the shore,
The moon shone down in splendor, Jim, it shone on you and I,
And the little stars were shining when we drank the old jug dry.

But that was those good old days, those good old days of yore,
When Murphy run a tavern and Burnsy kept a store,
When whiskey ran as free, brave boys, as waters in the brook,
And the boys all for their stomach’s sake their morning bitters took.

But times they have now altered, Jim, and men have altered too,
Some have undertaken for to put rum sellers through,
For they say that whiskey’s poison and scores of graves has dug,
Ten thousand snakes and devils have been seen in our old jug.

But never mind such prattle, Jim, though some of it may be true,
We’ll lie where we’re a mind to, together, me and you,
For the drink they call cold water, won’t do for you nor I,
So we’ll haul the cork at leisure, and we’ll drink the old jug dry.

I recently checked out the current exhibit at the Minnesota History Center American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (an exhibit which, I couldn’t help but notice, is being “repealed” on March 16th – just in time for a certain holiday). It reminded me of this song which I transcribed from the singing of Robert Walker. Walker referred to it as an “anti-prohibition song” when he sang it for collector Sidney Robertson-Cowell in Crandon, Wisconsin in 1952. It appears on the record Wolf River Songs. (Robertson-Cowell also recorded Walker’s nephew Pat Ford singing his version of the song which you can hear on the Library of Congress website)

Across the northwoods, there was much opposition to prohibition from men who worked in the lumber industry. For many lumberjacks, drink was seen as a necessary relief from long hours and back-breaking labor. “Sacking,” mentioned in verse one, was certainly thirsty work. Walker explained: “When they was driving logs and high water had put ‘em way out in the marshes someplace, and the men’d have to get right into the water and roll ‘em out into the stream again, — that was sacking, see?”[1] Sacking was made especially harsh by frigid spring waters and huge logs beached far from the open stream by lumber companies’ use of temporary dams. Another Wisconsin lumberman, Robert Nelligan, wrote “There are few kinds of labor more arduous than river driving. We got up about three o’clock in the morning and were at work all day until darkness fell, most of the time wading in icy cold water and sometimes more than wading. Men working under such a strain as this needed stimulants. Whiskey was used and much of it.”[2]

The song’s reference to Murphy’s tavern hints at the prevalence of Irish saloon owners in small northwoods towns like Crandon. In fact, when Irish-American Mike Dean transitioned from working as a lumberjack to buying his own saloon in Hinckley, Minnesota in the 1880s, he was taking up a profession dominated, in Pine County at least, by Irishmen. An 1887 list of Pine County liquor license applicants includes the surnames: Dean, Rourke, Tierney, Hurley, Brennan, Durkan, Connors, Connor and Hennesy![3]

So perhaps it is no coincidence that Dean did not stay long in Pine County after that county joined many other Minnesota counties in voting itself dry in 1915, five years before national prohibition. By 1917 Dean was settled in Virginia, Minnesota which had remained “wet” even though nearby Hibbing (and most of northwestern Minnesota) had gone “dry” along with Pine County in 1915. In fact, some clever songsmith in Hibbing had made another “anti-prohibition” song to the tune of the recent John McCormack hit “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary:”

It’s a long way to Old Virginia, it’s a long way to go,
It’s a long way to Old Virginia, to the wettest town I know,
Farewell, then, oh ye lager, farewell rock and rye,
It’s a long, long way to Old Virginia, when Hibbing goes dry.[4]

 


[1] Sidney Robertson Cowell, Wolf River Songs (NYC: Folkways LP FE 4001, 1956) 5.
[2] John Emmett Nelligan, A White Pine Empire: The Life of a Lumberman (St. Cloud: North Star, 1969) 33.
[3] Pine County Pioneer, Apr. 15, 1887.
[4] Al Zadon, “Power ‘The Little Giant of the North’,” Mesabi Daily News, Oct. 3, 1976.