The Jam on Gerry's Rock
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-11-20

Day 247 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "On a melodious winter evening in Salem, Oregon, Charles Olaf Olsen, logger and poet, was nsked to tell a lie that had few words and much imagination. He said, "Once there was a logger who had a trunk.”. . . .Then James Stevens, logger and author, sang "The Jam on Gerry's Rook," sonorously, rockingly, beating time with a sure, unfailing foot that slammed the floor with accurate measures. . . .

"It is a heavy, brooding ballad, portentous as a log boom on an ice locked river. . . .Rickaby, in an extended note, says it was born in Canada or Michigan, with the odds of witnesses in favor of Michigan. He observes, "Old fellows told me anyone starting (Jerry's Rock in the shanties was summarily shut off because the song was sung to death; others "Deacon seat" was shanty lingo for a seat, or board, extending from the lower tier of bunks and running square or oblong around the bunkhouse; it was where they sat between suppertime and bedtime and smoked, talked, sang, and told Paul Bunyan stories."

ADDITIONAL NOTE: Although this is probably the best-known of all lumbering ballads, its origins have never been traced. There seems to be a general sense that the song comes from the 1860s. (from the Traditional Ballad Index)