Hard work makes for good music

Did we get lucky. 

Last fall a visitor came to see the Northwest Montana History Museum’s new exhibit on logging and related industries, then offered to play us a soundtrack.

In the program “Range the Wild Woods Over” on April 24, Jeff Warner described life in the logging camps through stories, songs and critters. He accompanied himself with instruments from shards of cow femur to Jew’s harp (“nobody knows why it’s called that,” he said), spoons to guitar, concertina to banjo. He brought down the house with an acrobatic wood dancing man on a stick.  

The songs, passed along by word of mouth, both sounded of their time and were timeless. Warner — a fellow with a warm handshake and a boyish swoop of hair — sang of fun seeking during down time (“When the Shanty Boy Comes Down”), advice (“Save Your Money While You’re Young”), tragedy (“Jamie Judge,” about the dangers of logjams) and homesickness (“By the Hush,” which references the “General Meagher” who would become Montana’s first acting territorial governor).  

The New Hampshire-based performer traced some of the tunes' geographic trajectories. Many songs likely hopscotched across the country from northeastern forests (the Adirondacks were called the “Saudi Arabia of Wood” in the 19th century) and, before that, locales like Ireland or aboard a British sailing ship.  

The camps were known for unpleasant conditions. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration considers logging the most hazardous occupation. Now imagine what it was like before OSHA.  

As lumberjacks felled the timber that became railroad ties and built the country, they plunged deeper into the woods and lived in on-site communities. Call it work-forced housing. The “Lumberjacks, Tie Hacks & River Pigs” exhibit details how loggers in camps ate up to 9,000 calories a day, their protests for improved conditions and other ways they managed a harsh environment. 

As for the lice, Warner said, “It got to be where you picked off the biggest one, gave it a little pet then threw it on to the next guy.” 

To keep the peace, fights were discouraged; same with alcohol. “But they had songs,” Warner said. New hires would be greeted with, “What songs do you know?” 

Warner grew up steeped in traditional music. 

Starting in the late 1930s, his parents, Frank and Anne Warner, traveled the rural eastern U.S. — sometimes en famille — for nearly three decades to collect songs, including the first recording of “Tom Dooley.” The collection is in the Library of Congress. The library hosted a multimedia, online presentation on their work, “From the Mountains to the Sea,” which is well worth any folk nerd’s time. Warner himself was at Newport when Bob Dylan went electric; his dad ran the festival. Pete Seeger later hired Warner as his tour manager. 

Warner describes folk songs as tunes that bring the latest news from the distant past.  

A few days afterward I went to Missoula to hear Bruce Cockburn, a song crafter who can rail against the IMF while pulling off a rhyme with “insupportable debt” in “Call It Democracy.” I dare AI to come up with something like that, and make it sound good. 

Songs that tell our stories stick to us, as music for the people by the people.  

Margaret E. Davis, executive director of the Northwest Montana History Museum, can be reached at mdavis@dailyinterlake.com.