Driving Saw Logs on the Plover
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-11-21

Day 248 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Winter was the big time for work in the logging camps. The logs cut during winter were floated to the saw mills as the frozen rivers loosened up for the "drive" in the spring. Boys needed on the farms in summer and fall took a turn at logging in the winter. So there was plenty of argument on whether a farm hand or a shanty-boy had the better of it, in pay and cash or in favor with the girls. . . .

In M. C. Dean's collection The Flying Cloud is an old song I Love My Sailor Boy, [ed. note: I can find no tune for this song, so it goes unrecorded at this time.] with a mother's advice and a daughter's scorn in two verses: 

"Then wed a steady farmer's son that whistles at the plow,
And then you will have time enough to tend both sheep and cows.
But your sailor he'll carouse and drink whenever he comes on shore,
And when his money is spent and gone, he'll sail the seas for more." 

"A fig for all your farmer's sons! Such lovers I disdain.
There is not one among them dare face the raging main.
And when the winds are howling and the billows are white as snow,
I'll venture my life with the lad that dare go where stormy winds do blow." 

The text and tune here were notated by Franz Rickaby from W. N. Allen of Wausau, Wisconsin. Allen composed the verses in 1873, using the tune of an old song about a mother's words to her son as he went away to the Crimean War.