James Whaland
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-11-17

Day 244 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Jim Whalen is told by his foreman to help clear a logjam. When the jam breaks, he is thrown into the rapids and drowned. 

Sandburg writes: "Slow, ponderous, inevitable, this proceeds like a witness whose testimony is unshakable. He saw what he tells, knows how it happened, and is sure it is the truth. . . .

"Edwin Ford Piper of the University of Iowa, heard this in the 1890's from farmhands who had been up in a Minnesota logging camp."

MORE INFO: A shanty-boy or shantyman was a lumberjack.

"Franz Rickaby, Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy (1926), reports this to be based on an actual incident, in which James Phalen (so spelled; pronounced Whalen) died at "King's Chute" on the Mississippi River. (That's the Canadian Mississippi, a tributary of the Ottawa). Rickaby's informant, Cristopher Forbes, is the source of the claim that John Smith of Lanark wrote the song. The date of the event is uncertain; Rickaby states it was in 1878, but Fowke quotes Phalen's grand-niece to the effect that the date was 1876. One of Beck's informants agreed that it was on the Matawaski (the Canadian Mississippi), but thought the date was around 1882." (from the Traditional Ballad Index)