Franz Rickaby - evergreentrad

23 Oct

Recordings of Mike Dean Rediscovered

Lost 88-Year-Old Recordings of Irish-Minnesotan Singer Rediscovered

This is my fifth column here and, for this month, I have some exciting news that I would like to share rather than posting another song. I recently came upon some astounding recordings! Here is the story:

The texts of all four songs that have appeared in this column so far came from The Flying Cloud, a songster (simple, text-only song book) printed in 1922 by singer/lumberjack/saloon-keeper Michael Cassius Dean in Virginia, Minnesota. We would not know much about what Dean’s songs (and singing) sounded like if we only had his book. Luckily, in summer 1923, groundbreaking song collector Franz Rickaby, English professor at the University of North Dakota, visited Dean in Virginia, MN. Rickaby transcribed, from Dean’s singing, the melodies and words to 27 songs and took down some sparse but helpful notes about Dean’s life and the story behind some songs.

Rickaby’s notes on Dean gave me a starting point to figure out more about Dean’s life, and since so little is known about these early Irish lumberjack singers in Minnesota, it seemed like a worthwhile project. That was my thought back in 2009 when I began searching for everything I could find about Michael C. Dean. Using census documents, newspaper archives from Minnesota and New York State (where he was born) and correspondence with a descendant of his brother, I have been able to learn a great deal. His parents were both from County Mayo. He was born in St. Lawrence County, New York around 1858. By 1885 he was based in Hinckley, Minnesota. He moved to Pine City, MN in 1907 and then to Virginia, MN in 1917 where he stayed until his death in 1931. I have many more wonderful details, but let’s move on to the big news.

This July, I came upon an online collection of digitized New York State newspapers. I was using it to find out more about Dean’s family in St. Lawrence County. One day, I was searching for articles about his brother-in-law John Bird when I found the article to the right. It is from a September 16, 1924 issue of the Canton Commercial Advertiser.

The R.W. Gordon mentioned in the article was Robert Winslow Gordon, field recording pioneer and founding head of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress! Gordon’s collection of recordings is housed at what is now called the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress. However, there is no mention of any recordings of Dean in the catalog of the AFC…

I contacted Ann Hoog at the AFC and she found a section of the Gordon recording collection labeled “Miscellaneous.” Among hundreds of tracks in that section were two labeled simply “Dean-man” and three labeled “Mr. Dean.” My friend Deirdre Ní Chonghaile was kind enough to go in and listen to the “Dean” tracks and surrounding unlabeled tracks on the reel-to-reel tapes that were made from Gordon’s original wax cylinders in the 1970s. Deirdre compared voices and also sent me first lines of songs which I was able to compare to his book to find matches. It turns out that there are, at least, 31 songs recorded from Michael Dean’s singing that day in 1924 on the tapes! You can imagine my excitement when I found out I was going to hear the singing voice of this man I have been researching for three years!

Digital research copies of Library of Congress recordings are not cheap… but they arrived in the mail last Thursday. It is just amazing to hear his voice and I really enjoy his singing. He has great personality in his style and he definitely sounds Irish in the way he pronounces words and in how he ornaments his songs—he is very light and agile on some tracks especially. (There are also telling discrepancies between the recordings and the Rickaby transcriptions of the same songs.)

Gordon only captured a verse or two of most songs in order to save valuable space and the sound quality is, well, 88-year-old wax. Still, to hear recordings of so many songs from a singer who was born in 1858 and lived in Minnesota for most of his life is just priceless. I can’t wait to learn every one of them!
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12 Aug

The Roving Irishman

I am a roving Irishman that roves from town to town,
I lately took a notion to view some foreign ground,
So with my knapsack on my shoulder and shillala in my hand,
I sailed away to America to view that happy land.

When I landed in Philadelphia the girls all laughed with joy,
Says one unto another, “There comes a roving boy.”
One treated to a bottle and another to a dram,
And the toast went ’round so merrily, “Success to the Irishman.”

The very first night at the house where I was going to stay,
The landlady’s daughter grew very fond of me;
She kissed me and she hugged me and she took me by the hand,
And she whispers to her mother, “How I love this Irishman.”

It was early next morning when I was going away,
The landlady’s daughter those words to me did say,
“How can you be so cruel or prove so very unkind,
As to go away a-roving and leave me here behind?”

Oh, I am bound for Wisconsin, that’s right among the Dutch,
And as for conversation it won’t be very much,
But by signs and by signals I’ll make them understand
That the spirits of good nature lies in this Irishman.

Now it’s time to leave off roving and take myself a wife,
And for to live happy the remainder of my life;
Oh, I’ll hug her and I’ll kiss her, oh, I’ll do the best I can
For to make her bless the day that she wed with this Irishman.

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I sang this song for singer Len Graham of County Antrim, Ireland and he immediately recognized it as a version of “The Roving Journeyman” aka “The Little Beggerman.” I learned another version when I was a teenager up in Bemidji, MN but I didn’t realize they were related because I had a different melody (the one often called “The Red Haired Boy”) for my earlier version. Dean’s air is much more somber.

Later, I came across a version, called “The Rambling Kerry Lad,” recorded from Bridget Granbhil of the Dingle Peninsula that is very similar in melody and text to Dean’s version. You can hear Granbhil’s version on the Folkways album Traditional Music of Ireland, Vol. 2: Songs and Dances from Down, Kerry, and Clare. The song was a vehicle for the “traditional creativity” of other “woods singers” in Dean’s childhood home of St. Lawrence County, New York. Two personalized versions, “The Roving Cunningham” and “The Roving Ashlaw Man” were recorded there by Robert Bethke in the 1970s from brothers Ted and Eddie Ashlaw.

We don’t know where Dean learned the song but his version bears the mark of more personalization – this time to the Midwest. The 5^th verse is unique to Dean’s collection with its reference to the somewhat non-conversational Dutch of Wisconsin (“Dutch” here almost certainly means German, or Deutsch, rather than the modern usage of the word for folks from the Netherlands). This verse could easily have been composed by Dean himself. In fact, my research has turned up a story of Dean reluctantly leaving Hinckley, Minnesota in 1889 for a brief stint as a bartender in a saloon in Superior, Wisconsin. He didn’t last long there and the Pine County Pioneer even reported that “Mike does not fancy the town.” Maybe this had to do with a German deficiency in the “gift of the gab” (or maybe it was just a crummy job). Also, since Dean was, by all accounts, a sociable bartender for most of his adult life, it’s easy to guess what is meant by “the spirits of good nature!”

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More detailed information on this song from the Traditional Ballad Index

Listen to other versions online!

Bridget Granbhil’s “The Rambling Kerry Lad”
Ted Ashlaw’s “The Roving Cunningham”
Eddie Ashlaw’s “The Roving Ashlaw Man”

04 Jul

Morrisy and the Russian Sailor (Laws H18)

Come, all you sons of Erin, attention now I crave,
While I relate the praises of an Irish hero brave;
Concerning a great fight, me boys, all on the other day,
Between a Russian sailor and bold Jack Morrisy.

It was in Tierra Del Fuego, in South America,
The Russian challenged Morrisy and unto him did say,
“I hear you are a fighting man and wear a belt, I see;
What do you say, will you consent to have a round with me.

Then up spoke bold Jack Morrisy, with a heart so stout and true,
Saying, “I am a gallant Irishman that never was subdued;
Oh, I can whale a Yankee, a Saxon bull or bear,
And in honor of old Paddy’s land I’ll still those laurels wear.

These words enraged the Russian upon that foreign land,
To think that he would be put down by any Irishman;
He says, “You are too light for me, on that make no mistake,
I would have you to resign the belt, or else your life I’ll take.”

To fight upon the tenth of June those heroes did agree,
And thousands came from every part the battle for to see;
The English and the Russians, their hearts were filled with glee,
They swore the Russian sailor boy would kill bold Morrisy.

They both stripped off, stepped in the ring, most glorious to be seen,
And Morrisy put on the belt, ’bound round with shamrocks, green,
Full twenty thousand dollars, as you may plainly see,
That was to be the champion’s prize that gained the victory.

They both shook hands, walked ’round the ring commencing then to fight,
It filled each Irish heart with joy for to behold the sight;
The Russian he floored Morrisy up to the elev,enth round,
With English, Russian and Saxon cheers the valley did resound.

A minute and a half our hero lay before he could rise,
The word went all about the field, “He’s dead!” were all their cries;
But Morrisy worked manfully and, raising from the ground,
From that until the twentieth theRussian he put down.

Up to the thirty-seventh round ’twas fall and fall about,
“Which made the burly sailor to keep a sharp look-out;
The Russian called his second and asked for a glass of wine,
Our Irish hero smiled and said, “This battle will be mine.”

The thirty-eighth decided all, the Russian felt the smart,
When Morrisy, with a fearful blow, he struck him o’er the heart,
A doctor he was called on to open up a vein,
He said it was quite useless, he would never fight again.

Our hero conquered Thompson, the Yankee clipper, too,
The Benicia boy and Sheppard he nobly did subdue;
So let us fill a flowing bowl and drink a health galore
To brave Jack Morrisy and Paddies evermore.

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This ballad has been found in Ireland and also in the Canadian Maritime provinces but the version here (like last month’s song) comes from Minnesota’s Mike Dean. It is the only version collected from a singer from the Great Lakes region. Dean’s text was printed in his own song book in 1922. His text and melody were printed in Franz Rickaby’s Ballads and Songs of the Shanty Boy in 1924 and then reprinted in 1927 by the famous poet, author and folk-song enthusiast Carl Sandburg in his enormously popular book the American Songbag.

Sandburg used Dean’s song to illustrate the popularity of Irish songs and Irish singers in the lumber camps. Indeed, the ballad’s hero is the famous Irish-born, bare-knuckle boxer John Morrissey who came to Troy, New York with his parents in 1833 at the age of two and whose colorful life stands as a testament to the wild ups and downs experienced by freewheeling Irish immigrant men of his generation. Morrissey was an Irish gang member in his youth, a prospector in the California gold rush, the champion heavyweight boxer of the world, a casino tycoon and a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. However, it seems that his fight with the “Russian Bear” was probably a fictitious creation of a ballad maker.

There is good reason to believe the song struck a chord with Dean and others like him. Many Irish lumbermen were proud of their ability to fight and some contended that it was indeed necessary to success in the environment they lived in. Lumberman John Emmett Nelligan’s 1929 autobiography “A White Pine Empire” is full of references to what he called the “hot headed, fighting disciples of Brian Boru.”[i]

Himself the son of Irish immigrants, Nelligan traces his career from 15-year-old rookie cook in a New Brunswick logging camp to successful logging company owner in Wisconsin, many times using his fists, or at least physical intimidation, to get out of a tough situation with other rough and tumble men. A song from the St. Croix Valley puts the exploits of another Irish-American lumberman, Ed Hart, in verse:

And on the Namekagon drive
With Tom Mackey I have been,
Where I fought the great Tom Haggerty—
While Bill Hanson stood between;

And I fought with big John Mealey—
And might have won the day,
If bould Jake Resser had been there
And seen I had fair play.[ii]

Indeed, Mr. Hart’s ability to hold his own served him beyond his time as a pioneer lumberjack. He later retired to a farm in the town of Bashaw, WI where he maintained a “stopping place” for itinerant shanty boys in the late 1800s. Ed was described by one acquaintance as “soft spoken until angered at which time he became a little hellion on red wheels.” If the boys at his stopping place would get out of hand “Ed would emerge from his house a-bellerin like the ‘Bull of Bashaw’ with his wispy whiskers stickin straight out carrying an axe handle. He was apparently not too particular who got an ‘almighty thunk on the head’ until peace was restored.”

Alan Lomax captured the essence of a “party piece” performance of “Morrissey and the Russian Sailor” on a visit to Ireland when he recorded Seán ‘ac Dhonnchadha singing a version with a similar text but different air (amid wild cheers of encouragement from the “audience”). You can hear that on World Library of Folk & Primitive Music, Vol. 2: Ireland. It’s well worth a listen!

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More detailed information on this song from the Traditional Ballad Index

[i] Nelligan, John Emmett. A White Pine Empire: The Life of a Lumberman. St. Cloud: North Star, 1969, p. 12.
[ii] From The Ballad of Mickey Free as printed in Dunn, Kames Taylor. The St. Croix: Midwest Border River. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1965, p. 254-256.