Folk Songs Out of Wisconsin: An Illustrated Compendium of Words and Music

Folk Songs Out of Wisconsin: An Illustrated Compendium of Words and Music by Harry B. Peters. paperback edition. ISBN: 9780870201653.

Rear cover notes: "This unique book contains the lyrics and music of 200 songs that were once sung by the ordinary people of Wisconsin: by farmers and lumberjacks, sailors and tradesmen, housewives and schoolchildren of widely differing cultural and ethnic traditions who settled here in the second half of the nineteenth century. The songs were collected, for the most part, during the Great Depression and just after World War II, when many of the singers were in their seventies and eighties. Some of these songs have never been published before; others were adapted by the balladeers from older songs to fit the Wisconsin scene. They transmit familiar legends and stories, express moods, life styles, and various aspects of culture; they deal with real and imagined people, with work and play, marriage and politics, disasters and frolics. Some make jokes; some are sheerest nonsense. As Professor Peters writes in his Introduction: It is too much to claim that these songs comprise a social history of Wisconsin during the last century, or that they are significantly different in theme or content from those that were sung by Ohio boatmen or Kansas plowboys. Heartbreak, nonsense, and sudden death were - and are - a part of all "American lives. but to read these lyrics, perhaps to pick out the tunes, is to grasp something of those who went before....In their own way these songs, and others like them, are as important to an understanding of our past as any merchants ledger or politicians letters. Like crackled photographic plates or dim, yellowing newspapers, they retain the power to move us. They remind us, with a pang, of our roots."