Wisconsin - evergreentrad

01 Sep

Lost on the Lady Elgin (revisited)

Up from the poor man’s cottage, forth from the mansion door,
Sweeping across the water and echoing along the shore,
Caught by the morning breezes, borne on the evening gale,
Came at the dawn of morning a sad and solemn wail.

Refrain—
Lost on the Lady Elgin, sleeping to wake no more,
Numbering in death five hundred that failed to reach the shore.

Sad was the wail of children, weeping for parents gone,
Children that slept at evening, orphans woke at morn;
Sisters for brothers weeping, husbands for missing wives,
These were the ties that were severed by those five hundred lives.

Staunch was the noble steamer, precious the freight she bore,
Gaily they loosed their cables a few short hours before,
Proudly she swept our harbor, joyfully rang the bell,
Little they thought ere morning it would peal so sad a knell.

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We return this month to the song “Lost on the Lady Elgin” from the repertoire of Minnesota singer Michael Dean. The song depicts the outpouring of grief that followed the tragic sinking of the side-wheel passenger steamer Lady Elgin in Lake Michigan 156 years ago in September 1860. The ship’s loss struck a particularly painful blow to the Irish community of Milwaukee’s Third Ward as many of the doomed passengers hailed from that area. The Lost Forty was in Milwaukee ourselves last month for their annual Irish Fest and we videotaped our version of the song in the historic Third Ward on the banks of Lake Michigan.

Michael Dean’s older brother James came to Milwaukee around 1865 and lived in the Seventh Ward—just north of the Third. James Dean served a long career as conductor for the Milwaukee Railroad. It is possible that Michael learned the song during a trip to visit his brother though the song also travelled all around the US and Canada and was popular throughout the Great Lakes region especially.

Since I began singing “The Lady Elgin” I have met people who have stories about family members singing the song and, in the case of one audience member I met at the Minnesota Irish Fair last year, an ancestor who was lost in the wreck itself.

09 Dec

Kettle River

On the banks of Kettle River, among swamps and bogs,
We’ve been busy all winter getting out logs,
To stay through to springtime it is our design,
And the firm that we work for is called the O’Brien.

Refrain: Fol the diddle eye doh right fol the dol day

There’s Billy and George, they are well known to all,
And that ragged old veteran named Old Man MacColl,
There’s two gangs of swampers whose names I don’t mind,
But I’ll never forget the name Johnny O’Brien.
Refrain

Noble Wilson is our foreman, we all know him well,
He runs through the woods, he curses like hell,
Turns us out in the morning in rain or sunshine,
And works us like blazes for Johnny O’Brien.
Refrain

He’ll pull out his watch and look up to the sun,
Saying, “Hurry up boys, let’s get this work done,
Pitch in there you sawyers and down with the pine,
We’ll all go to Hinckley when we’re done with O’Brien.”
Refrain

Charley Olson is our cook, boys, I’m telling no lies,
He’s a dandy at putting up puddings and pies,
He’ll fill you with grub till your bellies will shine,
You never go hungry when working for O’Brien.
Refrain

Hurry up boys and let’s get it all done,
The job’s nearly completed, we’ll soon all be gone,
But in years to come we will all bear in mind,
The years that we worked for old Johnny O’Brien.
Refrain

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In addition to the “come-all-ye” type ballads so popular in northwoods lumber camps, shanty-boys (lumberjacks) also enjoyed lighthearted, extremely localized songs celebrating, and often lampooning, the personalities found in their particular camp. Collector Edith Fowke documented numerous examples of these “camp songs” in Ontario.

The above is my own adaptation of a rare Minnesota-based camp song that originated in an 1881 camp on the Kettle River near Hinckley, Minnesota. “Kettle River” was sung “lustily” by an 88 year-old John Stewart of Port Wing, Wisconsin, for historian Agnes Larson in 1932. In her 1949 book The White Pine Industry in Minnesota, Larson wrote that “somehow the old camp came back to life in [Stewart’s] soul as he sang.” Unfortunately, some of the words did not come back to Mr. Stewart so I added a few here and there to flesh out his version. Since Larson’s book included no melody, I chose a version of a melody used for several Ontario camp songs documented by Fowke.

The boss Johnny O’Brien mentioned in the song was most likely the father of Irish-American lumber baron William O’Brien. An 1896 obituary in The Hinckley Enterprise says “John O’Brien, an old time logger, and resident of Taylors Falls, and father of Wm. And Jos. O’Brien, loggers . . . has been a prominent logger on the St. Croix for the past 40 years, the major portion of the time being in Pine County.” Like many other early loggers in this area, John was born to Irish parents in Canada and came to Minnesota following logging jobs. His son William made his first million in Pine County, lived in a mansion next door to the governor’s mansion her in St. Paul and is the man for whom William O’Brien State Park is named. I also found evidence that William was a fishing buddy of Pine County resident and singer Mike Dean who turns up frequently in this column.

I recorded this song with guitar accompaniment on my album Minnesota Lumberjack Songs.

31 Oct

Three Nations

In the year of eighteen hundred, I believe, and twenty-five,
A story true I’ll tell to you as sure as I’m alive,
It was of three jolly heroes bold who happened to meet by chance,
For the sake of fun each man begun his country to advance.

Refrain (use first two lines of melody):
With your shamrock green, the thistle keen, together with the rose,
Your abundant sons with their swords and guns have oft times faced their foes.

Says George “We are a nation that’s proper neat and tall,
There is no one that can us resist, or break our wooden wall,
Oh, our ships can beat all nations no odds would come again’ ’em,”
“Arrah faith” says Pat “you may well say that when the Irish lads are in ’em.” (refrain)

Says Pat “we are a nation that ramble up and down,
And on the fields of battle we are in thousands found.
Give me the Fág an Bealach boys and the Connaught Rangers too,
And we’ll stand our ground ’gin all the French who fought at Waterloo. (refrain)

Says Andrew “We are a nation and that I’ll not deny,
We’ve never lost a battle, nor from our colors fly.
We have often proved good soldiers true where the bullets like hailstones flew,”
“Oh yes” says Pat “I remember that that day at Waterloo.” (refrain)

So Andrew drank to St. Andrew, for to cause another duel,
And George drank to St. George, who did the dragon kill,
And Pat drank to St. Patrick, and he mentioned Wallace too,
And they all shook hands and blessed the land that’s far from Waterloo.
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This rare song harkens back to Napoleon and the English, Scottish and Irish men that fought against him under the English flag. Helene Stratman-Thomas collected it in 1941 from second-generation Scotsman Thomas Hunter [b. 1868] of Galesville, Wisconsin. Hunter learned it on a log drive on the Prairie River north of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, from Ross Byers of Michigan who got it from his own Scottish immigrant father. You can hear Stratman-Thomas’ recording of Hunter online via the wonderful Wisconsin Folksong Collection made available by the University of Wisconsin.

Unsatisfied with Hunter’s melody for the song, I borrowed another popular Great Lakes melody when I recorded “The Three Nations” for my CD Minnesota Lumberjack Songs. Since then, I came across a version sung by Beaver Island, Michigan singer Mike J. O’Donnell (recorded in 1938 by Ivan Walton). O’Donnell uses the above air which I think works quite well. O’Donnell (a source for last month’s song as well) learned it from Hughie Boyle of Harbor Springs, Michigan.

The Napoleonic Wars actually had a hand in spurring the northwoods song tradition itself. Napoleon’s blockade British shipping routes to Baltic timber suppliers helped open up Canadian forests as a source for replenishing the British fleet. Timber ships heading from Liverpool to St. John, New Brunswick or Quebec City for Canadian timber brought thousands of war-weary Irish settlers to Canada where they worked in the woods, sang songs and made new lives “far from Waterloo.”