drink - evergreentrad

20 Jan

The Pitcher of Beer

I’m a friend of the poor man wherever I roam, no matter what countryman he,
I will share in my loaf and the meat on the bone, with a gra machree welcome for thee.
Each night in the week, each week in the year, with our hearts and our conscience both clear,
We will fill up the glass for to help the time pass, and drink from the pitcher of beer.
(Gallagher repeats these last two lines here with the same melody)

The child in the cradle, the dog at the door, the fireside cheerful and bright,
The old folks at the table with plenty galore will welcome you in with delight.
Their blessings they’ll give, it’s “Long may you live, and merrily pass over each year,”
They will hand you their glass for to help the time pass, and drink from the pitcher of beer.

Oh be cheerful and merry for life’s but a day, we’ll die and leave others behind,
For to fret and to worry, to weep and to pray, when relief we can easi-lye find.
Just pull up a chair and drive away care, and that will turn sorrow to cheer,
Tell a story or two, let it be old or new, and drink from the pitcher [spoken:] of beer.

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We are back to Beaver Island, Michigan this week with a song I transcribed from the singing of Dominick Gallagher as recorded by Ivan Walton in 1940. Gallagher (1867-1954), like many other Beaver Islanders of his generation, was the son of a man from Arranmore, County Donegal. Gallagher’s father, “Big Dominic” was himself a great singer with many songs imported from Arranmore. However, the younger Gallagher did not get this song from his father. He told Walton:

“I learned that song in the lumber woods when I was 17 years of age [ca. 1884], the first winter I left home, from an old French Canadian… …I was up in a camp called Camp Three. It was built new that fall ..up at Grand Marais on Lake Superior shores and that winter the snow was about five feet and a half on the level and I shoveled snow all winter for 16 dollars a month and put in 14 hours some days.”

As with “Barney Blake” (See Northwoods Songs, Oct. 2014), the Grand Marais mentioned is almost certainly Grand Marais, Michigan. And, like “Barney Blake,” “The Pitcher of Beer” is a song that began on the Irish music hall stage and then entered the unaccompanied tradition in the northwoods lumbercamps. The original was written by Edward Harrigan, one of the most renowned Irish songwriters of the 19^th century for the 1880 play The Mulligan Guard’s Christmas… so there is a seasonal connection. The Library of Congress has a copy of a sheet music version printed the year of the play. It’s interesting to compare the original with the way the song was sung by Gallagher.

26 Mar

Ned McCabe

I’m a fine old Irish laborer, from Ireland I came,
To try me luck on Columbia’s shore, and Ned McCabe’s my name.
I’ve had me days of sunshine, although I can’t complain,
But those good old days for laborers will never come back again.

Chorus:
’Tis boys, be gay and hearty, and never ye be afraid,
But bear misfortunes with a smile like poor old Ned McCabe

But when I landed in Quebec, I had nary a red at all,
I hired out to a contractor, boys, to work upon a canawl.
I’d eighty cents a day, me boys, and whiskey too had I,
But when I think of those good old days, it almost makes me cry. Chorus

*I’ve cleared the lands in the far-off west, and many a mile I’ve trod,
And many’s the snake, and wild beast, I’ve laid beneath the sod. Chorus

Now the winter time is coming on, and away down south I’ll go,
To secure myself a winter’s job away from frost and snow.
Old Canady being by favorite whenever there I went,
I could drink my twenty jiggers a day and never step off o’ the plank. Chorus

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Folk song collector Franz Rickaby made the above transcription of this very rare song from the singing of George Hankins (1849-1934) of Gordon, Wisconsin in the early 1920s. Earlier in his life, Hankins worked as a lumberjack and railroad man in Minnesota before making his home in Gordon, about 45 miles southeast of Duluth. Hankins told Rickaby that he learned the song when he first came to live in Wisconsin.

The song itself illustrates a familiar storyline for the first Irishmen to come to Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was common for Famine-era immigrants who sailed to Canada to find work as lumberjacks, railroad men, Great Lakes sailors or canal workers. Many of these men and their sons followed those jobs, or sometimes seasonal farm work, over the border into the US. So it was with many of the men who built Stillwater, Minnesota and other St. Croix Valley towns.

*I took some liberty with the words of this verse in what I published in the IMDA newsletter and in what I sing myself. The original as transcribed by Rickaby reads:

I’ve cleared the lands in the far-off west where no white man ever trod,
And many’s the snake, and red man too, I’ve laid beneath the sod.

04 Feb

We Are Anchored by the Roadside, Jim

We are anchored by the roadside, Jim, as we’ve oft-times been before,
When you and I were weary from sacking on the shore,
The moon shone down in splendor, Jim, it shone on you and I,
And the little stars were shining when we drank the old jug dry.

But that was those good old days, those good old days of yore,
When Murphy run a tavern and Burnsy kept a store,
When whiskey ran as free, brave boys, as waters in the brook,
And the boys all for their stomach’s sake their morning bitters took.

But times they have now altered, Jim, and men have altered too,
Some have undertaken for to put rum sellers through,
For they say that whiskey’s poison and scores of graves has dug,
Ten thousand snakes and devils have been seen in our old jug.

But never mind such prattle, Jim, though some of it may be true,
We’ll lie where we’re a mind to, together, me and you,
For the drink they call cold water, won’t do for you nor I,
So we’ll haul the cork at leisure, and we’ll drink the old jug dry.

I recently checked out the current exhibit at the Minnesota History Center American Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (an exhibit which, I couldn’t help but notice, is being “repealed” on March 16^th – just in time for a certain holiday). It reminded me of this song which I transcribed from the singing of Robert Walker. Walker referred to it as an “anti-prohibition song” when he sang it for collector Sidney Robertson-Cowell in Crandon, Wisconsin in 1952. It appears on the record Wolf River Songs. (Robertson-Cowell also recorded Walker’s nephew Pat Ford singing his version of the song which you can hear on the Library of Congress website)

Across the northwoods, there was much opposition to prohibition from men who worked in the lumber industry. For many lumberjacks, drink was seen as a necessary relief from long hours and back-breaking labor. “Sacking,” mentioned in verse one, was certainly thirsty work. Walker explained: “When they was driving logs and high water had put ‘em way out in the marshes someplace, and the men’d have to get right into the water and roll ‘em out into the stream again, — that was sacking, see?”[1] Sacking was made especially harsh by frigid spring waters and huge logs beached far from the open stream by lumber companies’ use of temporary dams. Another Wisconsin lumberman, Robert Nelligan, wrote “There are few kinds of labor more arduous than river driving. We got up about three o’clock in the morning and were at work all day until darkness fell, most of the time wading in icy cold water and sometimes more than wading. Men working under such a strain as this needed stimulants. Whiskey was used and much of it.”[2]

The song’s reference to Murphy’s tavern hints at the prevalence of Irish saloon owners in small northwoods towns like Crandon. In fact, when Irish-American Mike Dean transitioned from working as a lumberjack to buying his own saloon in Hinckley, Minnesota in the 1880s, he was taking up a profession dominated, in Pine County at least, by Irishmen. An 1887 list of Pine County liquor license applicants includes the surnames: Dean, Rourke, Tierney, Hurley, Brennan, Durkan, Connors, Connor and Hennesy![3]

So perhaps it is no coincidence that Dean did not stay long in Pine County after that county joined many other Minnesota counties in voting itself dry in 1915, five years before national prohibition. By 1917 Dean was settled in Virginia, Minnesota which had remained “wet” even though nearby Hibbing (and most of northwestern Minnesota) had gone “dry” along with Pine County in 1915. In fact, some clever songsmith in Hibbing had made another “anti-prohibition” song to the tune of the recent John McCormack hit “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary:”

It’s a long way to Old Virginia, it’s a long way to go,
It’s a long way to Old Virginia, to the wettest town I know,
Farewell, then, oh ye lager, farewell rock and rye,
It’s a long, long way to Old Virginia, when Hibbing goes dry.[4]

[1] Sidney Robertson Cowell, Wolf River Songs (NYC: Folkways LP FE 4001, 1956) 5.
[2] John Emmett Nelligan, A White Pine Empire: The Life of a Lumberman (St. Cloud: North Star, 1969) 33.
[3] Pine County Pioneer, Apr. 15, 1887.
[4] Al Zadon, “Power ‘The Little Giant of the North’,” Mesabi Daily News, Oct. 3, 1976.