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.