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Poster:
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Dhamma1 |
Date:
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July 29, 2012 04:24:57am |
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Forum:
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GratefulDead
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Subject:
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Re: The Frozen Logger |
This was sung by lumberjacks in the Great Lakes region beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, and it traveled to the West Coast with them after 1900 when the trees in Wisconsin and Minnesota were all harvested and the industry moved to Washington, Oregon, and northern California.
In the 1930s, a Wisconsin folklore professor recorded an elderly logger named Bert Taplin singing it (and other logging songs) as part of the WPA folklore project. Taplin was logging as early as 1885 on the Wisconsin River.
It's probably impossible to determine who wrote it. Like the Paul Bunyan stories, lumberjacks' songs traveled all through the logging regions and everyone who performed them added something new, however they saw fit. By the time it got stabilized on paper or recording tape, its creator was long forgotten.
James Stevens was a one-time logger who collected the Bunyan stories after World War One, rewrote them to be more literary, and published them in 1924. His adulterated versions went on to be a best-seller, and he went on to be a public relations expert for a logging trade association.
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