Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks

The lumberjacks of yesteryear in Maine and the Great Lakes States went into the woods in the fall and did not come out until the logs boomed down the streams in the Spring. During those winter nights in the shanties if the lumberjacks, or shantyboys, had any entertainment, they furnished it themselves. Under such conditions these songs and ballads were composed. When Alan Lomax made a two-and-a-half-month survey of Michigan folk-song for the Library of Congress in 1938, one of his primal)' objects was the location of the remaining survivors of the lumberwoods singing tradition. With the help of Dr. E. C. Beck he found some of them in the midland area around Mt. Pleasant and still more around Newberry, Munising, and Greenland on the upper peninsula. With the exception of Jim Kirkpatrick's version of "The Jam on Gerry's Rocks," which was made ten years later by a joint project of the University of Michigan and the Library of Congress, all of the singers were grizzled veterans of the Michigan forests. All have retired to the top berth in the big shanty. Bill McBride was 88 when he departed; his mind was keen to the last. Carl Lathrop was not quite so•old, and his voice remained firm.