Wisconsin Folklore

21 The Wanigan Song Book

21 The Wanigan Song Book Isabel J. Ebert Songs were plentiful in many northern Wisconsin lumber camps during the heyday of white pine logging that extended from the mid-nineteenth century until roughly the time of World War I. Veteran woods workers from Maine and Canada carried a tradition of altering old songs or composing new ones to convey the circumstances of their occupational lives. Some concerned death on the log drive; some chronicled the characters and incidents of a season's labor; while others celebrated skilled competitions. Franz Rickaby, a young Harvard-trained ballad scholar, provided our nnest glimpse of Wisconsin 's logging songs when he traveled the northwoods around 1920 to gather lyrics, tunes, and information from singers in Cornell, Eau Claire, Gordon, ladysmith, Rice lake, and Wausau. In Wausau Rickaby met William N. "Billy" Allen, a timber cruiser and the composer of three lumber camp ballads that became widespread in oral tradition: "The Banks of the little Eau Pleine," "Driving Saw logs on the Plover," and "Shanty Boy on the Big Eau Claire." Born in New Brunswick in 1843, Allen settled in Wausau in 1868. Around that time he began not only to compose "poems," but also to sing them during his frequent visits to lumber camps. (See Rickaby, Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926].) Although not a composer of Allen's stature, Emery DeNoyer of Rhinelander, whose story and songs appear below, was perhaps Wisconsin's finest lumber camp singer. His repertoire included not only woods ballads, but sentimental songs and comic ditties in the Irish and "coon song" veins popular in the era's music halls. DeNoyer also played the harmonica and even lugged a record player and a stock of fragile disks to complement his performances in isolated camps. DeNoyer's chronicler, Isabel Reid Johnson Ebert (1883-1973), was born in Morrisonville and taught there and in various Wisconsin schools. In 1908, she began the nrst of several teaching stints in Rhinelander. With her husband, Marcus, she founded and directed Minne-Wawa Summer Camp for Girls in 1912, and she was instrumental in starting the area's Northland Historical Society. Isabel Ebert was also active in the maintenance of Rhinelander's logging museum and compiled a list of lumber camp speech, part of which found its way into l. G. Sorden's Lumberjack Lingo (Spring Green, Wisc.; Wisconsin House, 1969). Sorden, a longtime Oneida County agent within the University of Wisconsin's Extension system, dedicated his occupational dictionary ''To Mrs. Isabel J. Ebert, lake Tomahawk, Wisconsin. Educator and lifetime historian of northern Wisconsin and coauthor of the original publication of Loggers' Words of Yesteryears (1956), and for her assistance in collecting many of these words." Ebert's educator's bent is evident in comparisons she makes between the blind Emery DeNoyer and Homer, while her title, The Wanigan Song Book, uses "lingo" to assert the necessity of songs. A "wanigan" is: 1) a lumber camp store; 2) the payroll charges for goods purchased from the camp store; and 3) the cook's raft, which followed the river drive (Sorden 1969: 138). Thanks to Isabel Ebert's efforts, Emery DeNoyer's Irish-derived "woods style" singing and his harmonica playing were recorded by Helene Stratman-Thomas for the library of Congress in the 200 EBERT: The Wanigan Song Book 1940s. Readily available performances include: "Shantyman's Life," Folk Music from Wisconsin (Library of Congress, AAFS L55); and ''The Jam on Gerry's Rock," ''The Little Brown Bulls," "Shantyman 's Life," "Snow Deer" (harmonica instrumental), and "Tomahawk Hem," The Wisconsin Patchwork: Recordings from the Helene Stratman-Thomas Collection of Wisconsin Folk Music, (cassettes produced by Judy Rose, with an accompanying book by James P. Leary [Madison: University of Wisconsin, Continuing Education in the Arts, 1987]). Reprinted from a mimeographed original published by the Rhinelander Logging Museum, mid-1940s. The Bard of the Lumber Camps It is dusk at a logging camp near Rhinelander in the late nineties. The snow is sifting down through the pine needles and settling upon the skidways and the tote roads. Through the growing drifts, a group of tired lumberjacks trudges toward the camp shanties. They are a frowzy crew, unshaven and unshorn, damp with their own perspiration and the snow. But with 3,000,000 feet of lumber logs to get into the rollways before spring breakup, they haven't a minute to waste from daylight until dark. They file wearily into the warm...