17 Feb

Doom on Superior

I am thinking of Lake Superior this month as I settle in to do music, along with the mighty Danny Diamond, for the play Whoosh! at the History Theatre in St. Paul. The Big Lake is a focus of the play (along with logging camps, the Civil War, Irish immigration and St. Anthony Falls) and, while looking for traditional songs relating to Lake Superior, I was reminded of this orphaned verse. The above text appears in William Ratigan’s 1960 book Great Lakes Shipwrecks & Survivals with this somewhat ambiguous note:

In its original form the ballad on the preceding page celebrated the loss of the vessel Antelope, presumably in Lake Michigan. Guesswork also fixes her as a schooner and the odds are in favor of the guess. There were thirteen Antelopes on the Lakes: seven schooners, two propellers, one brig, one scow, one barge, and one tug. They capsized and burned and foundered and were lost all over the various Lakes. But two of the schooners were wrecked on Lake Michigan in the year 1894, and therefore this date is applied to the song, which later became popular in the recital of other disasters, as shown in the adapted stanzas above.

Ratigan’s note seems to say that the verse was part of a localized variant of an earlier song about an Antelope that sank on Lake Michigan. The Lake Michigan song does exist and was documented by Ivan Walton and Edith Fowke who collected full versions of the song about Lake Michigan’s Antelope. I took the above melody from Fowke’s recording of “Skipper” Charles Henry Jeremy Snider of Toronto whose rendition appears on the Folkways album Songs of the Great Lakes. The book Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors by Walton and Grimm includes the Lake Superior verse as an addendum to an eight stanza version of the Lake Michigan song without giving a source for the fragment.

Ballad scholar Robert Waltz has theorized that the Lake Superior verse might refer to the 1897 wreck of the schooner Antelope off Michigan Island in the Apostle chain. That Antelope had been downgraded to a barge by the time it sank and no sailors were lost in the wreck so it’s not a perfect fit for the verse above.

So… it’s one to keep searching for! The verses from the Lake Michigan song could be reworked to go along with the Superior verse but I also hold out hope that the full Superior text must be out there somewhere. From Ratigan’s note, it could be that the Superior song was about a ship of a different name altogether. Stay tuned!

17 Feb

Albert Bulow

My name is Albert Bulow, that name I’ll never deny,
I leave my aged parents in sorrow for to die,
Little did I think, when in my youthful bloom,
I’d be taken to the scaffold, to meet my fatal doom.

Come, all you tender Christians, where ever you may be,
And likewise pay attention to these few lines you see,
For the murder of Franklin Eich, I am condemned to die,
On the nineteenth day of July, upon the scaffold high.   Cho.

It was in the city of Verndale I tried to make escape,
But Providence being against me, it proved to be too late,
They took me to the prison, all in my youthful bloom.
And now to the scaffold I must go to meet my fatal doom. Cho.

A mob thought to lynch me but the sheriff was warned in time,
And with Randall and their victim to Brainerd he did flee,
We left the angry mob all in their wrought up glee,
To leave the court of mercy deal justice unto me. Cho.

My friends came to see me and bid their last adieu,
They spoke their words of kindness and wept most bitterly.
And said to me, dear Albert, to-day you’ve got to die,
For the murder of Franklin Eich, upon the scaffold high. Cho.

Come, all young men, a warning take from me,
And leave a wild and sporting life; it leads to misery,
Bad company first, then liquor came in time;
It brought me down to the lowest, and to this awful crime. Cho.

It is sad, my friend, to leave you and bid you all good-bye,
But Fate is all against me and I am doomed to die,
That justice has been dealt to me, I’m not prepared to tell,
But God will treat me justly, he doeth all things well.

We start this year with a rare ballad that was actually printed as a broadside here in Minnesota in 1889. If newspaper accounts are true, it is also an example of a “gallows ballad” actually composed by the condemned criminal himself. The Morrison County Historical Society has an original broadside the heading of which reads:

EXECUTION SONG.
LITTLE FALLS, MINN. JULY 15, 1889
[WORDS COMPOSED BY ALBERT BULOW]
FIRST LINES SUNG AS CHORUS

Bulow’s broadside from the Morrison Co. Historical Society

The murder of well-to-do farmer Franklin Eich outside of Royalton, Minnesota in October 1888 and the subsequent apprehension, trial and hanging of Albert Bulow was followed closely in the Little Falls newspapers as well as papers in the Twin Cities. Bulow was hanged for his crime in Little Falls at 1:52AM on July 19, 1889.

The Minneapolis Journal on July 18th wrote:

Bulow, in order to beguile the tedious hours of waiting until death shall set him free, has composed a little song which he calls his death song. There is not much poetry in the piece and Bulow does not pretend that he has made much of a success of his poem but he has had it printed all the same and has been selling copies of it at 5 cents a copy. What Bulow proposes to do with the money he has raised in this peculiar way he does not say. It is all the money he has.

The St. Paul Daily Globe on July 19th reported that Bulow possessed “the German love of music” and that the jailer’s wife organized a quartet for the prisoner in which “Bulow’s voice was never below the others.” The same article reports that:

A few days ago, with the assistance of his night watch, he ground out a poem on himself, which was printed and sold to curious visitors at 15 cents per copy.  

Bulow’s song, in typical folk song fashion, was clearly modeled on the earlier American-made gallows ballad “James Rogers” (Rodgers was executed in 1858). I matched the Bulow text to the melody song for the James Rogers song by Minnesota singer Mike Dean (which I shared in the June 2023 Northwoods Songs).

Albert Bulow. Morrison Co. Historical Society
17 Feb

Once I Had a Girl

It’s once I had a girl, a bonny, bonny girl,
Her name I would scorn for to tell,
Although she’s got another all for to be her lover,
And she’s left me a-singing fare you well, fare you well,
And she’s left me a-singing fare you well.

As I walked out the Donnybrook side,
Near by the pine trees dwell,
It’s there I saw my girl, my bonny, bonny girl,
She was clasped in another man’s arms, arms, arms,
She was clasped in another man’s arms.

She reached out to me her lily white hand,
Just as if I was at her command,
Oh I soon passed her by, I ne’er cast an eye,
I was scorned to be slighted a girl, girl, girl,
I was scorned to be slighted by a girl.

Although my love is good, and just as good as she,
Although she has houses and land,
Of sweethearts I have plenty, I can count them out by twenty,
I can turn, I can change like the wind, wind, wind,
I can turn, I can change like the wind.

The above was sung by Mr. Sydney Boutilier of French Village, Nova Scotia for Helen Creighton’s recording machine in 1950. Creighton called it a “very pretty little love song” but, as far as I can tell, did not publish it in any of her folk song collections. It seems to be a rare song in tradition but I agree with Creighton that the melody is nice! I found this one among the many gems now available online through the Nova Scotia Archives at archives.novascotia.ca.