White-winged schooners once dominated commerce and culture on the
Great Lakes, and songs relieved the hours on board, but that way of
life and its music ended when steam-driven mechanical boats swept
schooners from the inland seas. Ivan H. Walton, late professor of
English in the School of Engineering at the University of Michigan,
restored the music once heard on schooners of the Great Lakes in
Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors. Edited by Joe Grimm,
this book gives a firsthand musical picture of how sailors once
lived aboard these ships.
Recognizing in the late 1930s, almost too late, that this rich
oral tradition was going to the grave along with the last
generation of schoonermen, Walton undertook a quest to save the
songs of the Great Lakes sailors. Racing time and its ravages, he
searched out ancient mariners in lakefront hospitals, hangouts, and
watering holes. Walton reconstructed songs from one of the most
colorful periods in American history, discovering melodies and
lyrics to more than a hundred songs. These songs lightened sailors'
labors, bringing them together while they worked hard on deck and
filling their idle hours off watch. They sang as they hoisted
sails, pumped out the hold, or tramped around the capstan to weigh
anchor. They created songs about food, life aboard the ship, the
Old Man, and the girls they left behind. They poked fun at other
vessels as well as their own. They sang laments to ghost ships lost
in the night or ships torn to pieces in the teeth of a gale.
With its stories, lyrics, musical scores by folksinger/historian
Lee Murdock, and accompanying CD, Windjammers ensures that sailing
chanteys that have not been heard for over one hundredyears can be
heard again and again far into the future.
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