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Book Information | About the book | Reviews | |||||||||||||||
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Windjammers Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors Ivan H. Walton with Joe Grimm 15 track CD included |
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. 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, Ivan H. 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. 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 hundred
years can be heard again and again far into the future. Also available: Songquest: The Journals of Great Lakes Folklorist Ivan H. Walton |
"Windjammers
marries the daunting field-collecting of Ivan
Walton, the meticulous research of the 'landlubber' Joe Grimm, and the musical
scores of Lee Murdock to produce a new perspective of Great Lakes sailor
life. . . . This is a fresh perspective of historical 'ditties' that never
made Billboard's Top Ten List, yet were popular among the freshwater sailors
for half a century. Windjammers brings
forgotten sailor songs and melodies, so common a century ago, into perspective
and allows the reader to contemplate how national and regional topics affected
life on the Great Lakes." —John F. Polacsek, Curator of Marine History, Dossin Great Lakes Museum |
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| Great
Lakes Books Series $41.95s cloth / ISBN 0-8143-2996-9 $28.95l paper / ISBN 0-8143-2997-7 268 pages / 7 x 10 48 illustrations 2002 contents > introduction [partial] > extract > index > |
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