Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era
From 1919-1922, Franz Rickaby, a young English professor at the University of North Dakota, wandered the Upper Midwest, collecting the songs of the lumber jacks, river drivers and sawmill hands.
With a fiddle slung over his shoulder, he struck up easy conversations with the men, gathering not just the words but the tones, and drawing vivid portraits of their performances. Rickaby died shortly before his groundbreaking Ballads and Songs of the Shanty Boy was published.
Carl Sandburg wrote, “His book renders the big woods, not with bizarre hokum and stupid claptrap…but with the fidelity of an unimpeachable witness.”
Now Pinery Boys incorporates, commemorates, contextualizes and complements Rickaby’s work and includes an introduction and annotations by eminent folklorist James P, Leary and an engaging biography by Rickabys’s granddaughter, Gretchen Dykstra, who traced the footsteps of the grandfather she never knew.
What People Are Saying About Pinery Boys
“A long-awaited reissue of Franz Rickaby’s pioneering work of 1926, possibly the finest scholarly collection of lumberjack songs.”
Jens Lund
“Rickaby’s book renders the big woods, not with bizarre hokum or studied claptrap…but with the feidelity of an unimpeachable witness.”
Carol Sandburg
“Franz Rickaby was to lumberjacks as my father was to coswboys.”