Interview
Lee Murdock
Rouse House Concerts
Austin, Texas
18 January, 1997

We're talking to Lee Murdock and we're in Austin at Rouse House concerts and I cant remember what day it is and neither can Lee.

It is I think Saturday the 18^th of January.

Thank you! You were giving me a little bit the story of your life. You didn't start out being an ethnomusicologist or anything, where did you start out?

Well, I started, I went to college at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. I started out in mathematics and the math department there was very good and I wasn't quite up to it, so I switched over to a new program they were doing, it was earth science...geology, so I got my degree in geology and didn't want to work for an oil company, didn't want to work for a mining company. My interest was in continental glaciation and of course there's a lot of good jobs in that. So I decided to, instead of going to field camp and getting a masters and maybe going to a PhD and teach continental glaciation or geomorphology for those of you folks out there who like geology and things like that, I decided to be a folk singer. I had been singing a long time prior to that but never really considered it as...only deep down did I consider in my heart that that's what I wanted to do. And decided...my girlfriend, now my wife saying you know you ought to try it. I went and became a folk singer and was going to give it three years and 21 years later I'm still at it.

Yikes! You didn't start out singing these Great Lakes songs...

No, I started out with a potpourri. I started sing now when I was 4 and I learned singing in grade school and boy scouts and things like that...I learned all different types of folk songs from all over the world and that was a time when Burl Ives was very very popular, The Weavers, and Peter Paul & Mary was a little bit later, the Kingston Trio...my favorite song when I was 7 years old was "Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley." Nothing like a 7 year old talking about a hanging. You know, we get so concerned about violence on TV nowadays and here back in 1960 my favorite song was about a guy who killed his wife and was hung on some mountain because he couldn't make it to Tennessee. The more things change the more they stay the same. At any rate I learned a lot of different types of folk music, blues, ragtime music, Irish music, and Scottish music, the hill songs, songs from the southern United States, out west. But then I found the songs where I was from, that is the Chicago area, the songs from the Great Lakes area, there was a whole singing tradition and of course a sailing tradition that went along with that, a thousand miles away from any salt water and that was just astounding to me. Perhaps also subconsciously the background I had in geology and my interest in continental glaciation, because where I grew up, that was why I was interested in it. The fact that where Chicago is now, twelve thousand years ago there was five thousand feet of ice, that was amazing to me, that's like the Front Range out in Colorado, over in Denver. That intrigued me. But the Great Lakes, that's what formed, the glaciers is what formed the Great Lakes. And so there seems to be a resonance happening in my life, a full circle thing, I should be where I'm at right now.

That's very nice! When did you start doing the nautical stuff...or non-nautical stuff, fresh nautical stuff?

The...I started singing the Great Lakes stuff...finding them...probably about 17 years ago. The first true Great Lakes song I heard was the one everybody else heard and that was "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald back in 1976.

I remember that one.

I'm sure many of us do. And the thing about it was that I learned another one a few years later that was a traditional one, over a hundred years old from a man name Art Thieme, a very fine singer from my home area of Illinois and I heard him sing it up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and it was a beautiful setting. Its called "The Red Iron Ore." And then I started to find another one, "The Persia's Crew," about a schooner that sank on November 18, 1868, all hands lost, on Lake Huron, and it was written by the sister of the first mate and I kept finding more of these interesting stories. And not only shipwreck stories, but songs about everyday life on the lakes and just got in over my head.

That's very cute

Well, its true though. I have three lifetimes worth of work.

OK, people collected these songs. You're nodding your head. Are they English origin, do they come from sea songs?

The songs come from many different walks of life. The songs that I sing, because I only speak English, excuse me American and North Central American. In the 1920s and the 30s there were a lot of scholars that were that were trying to find this music and the ballads they felt were being lost. Many of them, like John Lomax, went into the Appalachian Mountains, down into the Delta region to find many of the traditional songs that were sung by the chain gang workers on the Delta and of course the people who were picking the cotton. The ballads that had been brought over from Scotland and Ireland in the Appalachians and because of the isolation of the Appalachian Mountains the stories were almost identical and even the dialect was very similar to the dialect where those people came from a hundred and fifty years ago. And so that type of spark went throughout the academic community and there were a lot of people who went out west and a lot of people who went into the northeast and collected songs...Edith Fowke collected songs in Canada and this professor of English in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan, his name was IvanWalton, collected and spoke with many fellows who got their sea legs on the Great Lakes in the 1860s and 70s and 80s. And they were elderly, elderly gentlemen in the 1930s and he got some of the songs from them, and he's got...well, he is deceased many years ago now, but in the Bentley Historical Library there is a collection, 47 hours of taped songs and anecdotes, and 13 file boxes of materials this man collected. It was his life's work. There's some people that have gone there and they've spent a couple days and got what they wanted out of it, and I went there about 8 years ago for the first time, spent a day...no spent 5 hours, walked away. These recordings, they're really hard, they hurt your ears. They give you a headache. But the information on there, the songs and stories and anecdotes are so fascinating that you feel glued to it, but you walk out and that stuff certainly wont fit inside a ten gallon Stetson hat, I'll tell you that. At any rate, you're sitting there with that stuff and I came out...just in that 5 hour session, three songs. I had listened to about 2 hours of material at the most. I didn't even get through the first tape. It was less than an hour. I had three songs. Since then I've been back a number of times and have found the anecdotes...he interviewed this one fellow, Dr. Fred Nelson. He was the last captain of...he was the captain of the last schooner on Lake Michigan. Her name was The Hour Sun [?]. Professor Walton asked him "How come you never made the transition from sail to steam because he was a night watchman back in '33 up in Sturgeon Bay, in a shipyard up there, "How come you never made the transition from sail to steam?" He was a Norwegian immigrant. I'm not going to try and do the Norwegian accent, but he said something to the effect of this: "Bah! That's not sailing! Any farmer can drive one of those things!" He also made the statement that "When the singin' stopped, the sailin' stopped." And there's these amazing little gems that would have been lost, completely lost. And so it's my life's work to try and go through there. And that's why I say, just in this one collection, it seems like I have 3 lifetimes worth of work!

So people don't sing on boats anymore...

No, they watch videos. Sometimes they do swap stories. They do a lot of recollection about history, which I think all of us do. I think we talk about the old times. And when I was on the boats, I...you know they talked about the things that happened. You know when I say I was on the boats, I took a couple trips this summer. I've never been a commercial seaman. I'm a folksinger. But I've got the opportunity to rub shoulders with these fellows. And you know it was pretty interesting to be out on Lake Superior with the wind blowing oh about 30 miles per hour and 12 to 15 foot seas and the rain just whippin' through at about 40 degrees out.

This must have been in July, huh?

Well, it actually was in August. (Laugh) It was in the middle of August. But you know when you get out in the middle of Lake Superior, and you look down during the day, it can be a beautiful sunny day and you look down and the water is black. I mean, there's a bluish cast to it, but you look down and the water is black. There's an insidiousness there and that makes you truly want to respect the water and the lake herself. If you go onto Lake Superior, if you go overside, the sailors tell you you have five minutes before you become unconscious due to hypothermia because the water is so cold even in August. We had...I had my winter jacket on in August because we were in the middle of Lake Superior and it was about 40 degrees out. Sun was out. At that particular time. But it was COLD.

What kind of person is sailing today? Any walk of life...any histories of people out there?

They're about as varied as the people walking down Main Street. Some of them lament that its not fun anymore. Used to, when there was 250 boats out, you go into get unloaded, well sometimes you had to wait. The loading process would take maybe 12 hours. The unloading or loading process would take 12 hours. If you had a couple of boats in front of you, well that would give you about a day and a half on shore.Well, now they're in and out in about 6 hours. And so if you happen to hit it right, maybe you can go and grab a drink. And so they say it's not fun anymore, it's a business. Everybody's bottom-lining it. You know. And so the trials and tribulations of the average Great Lakes sailor are much the same as your average blue collar worker, nowadays, although I'm not sure it's exactly the same because how would you like to be out in a blowing gale on a big lake, ice all over the place so that if you make the wrong step you're overside, and that's the end of it.

Lost in the squall...

Its very dangerous work. The only more dangerous work than being a seaman is being a fisherman, and that's more dangerous than being a policeman, fire, more dangerous than coal miners more dangerous than steelworkers. And this is not just a person who's proposing this romantic life on the Great Lakes, on the Seven Seas or anything. This is fact. This is reality. It's the most dangerous work there is. That's why they get paid well. But the work...

How much do they usually get paid?

Oh I don't know what the starting pay is, but my guess it is probably twice what the average person would get. So if the average skilled worker would get $30,000 in the course of the year, they would probably be somewhere around twice that. The problem is, that they're on...at least 60 days and they're off 60 days, and they're off. And so things happen with the family and everything. Its not the lifestyle for everybody. It's very difficult to have a family. They have children and they're out on the lakes. There's a lot of people that retired from the lakes, just couldn't take it anymore.

And the songs you were singing earlier this evening, you were talking about people who did lumber in the winter..

Well, that was during the time when we had a traveling workforce. It was much the same as it was right now. Now many people have to work more than one job in order to make ends meet. Well, back in the old days, there were people who worked more than one job to make ends meet but they just didn't work them at the same time. They were seasonal workers, so you would work in the lumber camps in the winter time when they were felling the trees. And then you would help running the trees down the shoreline through the rivers etc and then some of them, if you got the position, you could help in the milling of the lumber, then ship the lumber on board the schooners, and there are a lot of lumber companies that exist to this day that...like the Edward Heinz Company, they had their own fleet of schooners back in the late 1800s. They have many stores now in the Chicago metropolitan area and throughout the Midwest. And you could get the different types of work. It was much the same down here. People would work the cotton fields and they'd maybe work the tobacco fields up in Kentucky or something like that. Different seasonal work. Or they'd go down to the Gulf and maybe work on the shrimp boats, depending on the season, because people needed to be employed. They were a little bit, well I'm reticent to say more mobile than we are, but there was this migrant work force of mainly young men that hadn't set down roots yet, that were trying to find their lot in life.

Now, I'm going to change the subject. Where do you usually perform. It seems like you have quite a little act that some people don't have. You have little explanations that sound pretty smooth.

I do a lot of educational work. I do a lot of work in schools. I do a program called "Folk Songs of the Great Lakes region. Around Illinois and Michigan and Wisconsin and Ohio and Ontario Canada and Pennsylvania, new York State, Indiana, where I'll go into schools and its like a musical geography lesson. It not only talks about, you know, different walks of life around the Great Lakes, but about history and things like that and it's a natural extension of that because I find not only children are interested in that but adults too,. I do a lot of work in museums, for museums, historical societies and folk clubs, so I've been able to make myself available to a number of types of opportunities for employment. Now what's interesting I'll go into a senior center and do things like "You Are My Sunshine" and "Bicycle Built For Two" and everybody will join in, but then I'll throw in, you know a Great Lakes Ballad and I'll tell them about it. And that brings a little something to the elderly folks that cant get out because of the weather or because of the physical condition themselves and it gives them something that's a little, you know, education and entertainment too, that's what I do.

And you write songs too, don't you, besides doing the traditional ones?

Yes, I've written some songs. Sometimes there's a story that just needs to have a song about it and when the muse descends a song gets written. I don't...I cant really take a lot of credit for the songs I write because many times I don't even know where a song is going, it just kind of happens. Its like I'm the vehicle and somebody's moving my hand. Its not quite that dramatic, but I don't know where these words are coming from but its there and then when I come back...I guess maybe I tap into the collective consciousness or something. And so I cant take a lot of credit for the songs that I write but I'm sure glad that the stories are out there and that I can participate in someway shape to spread the stories around.

So you use mostly stories from Great Lakes ships and things...

That's what I do right now primarily, the stories about shipping on the Great Lakes, because its an opportunity for heroism and we don't have enough heroes in our society now. And our culture is based in heroism. I guess just about every culture is based on...there's a certain heroic age in each culture that people tap into in parables or for a teaching mechanism and so many times our heroes fall short nowadays because they're only human or for whatever reason they fall short. Its probably not due to the heroes fault. Its probably due to our perception, you know of raising these heroes up. And when you find truly heroic events that happen...I happen to find them around the Great Lakes, but you find them in...I was in the Alamo a couple days ago. There were one or two heroes there. But also the people who survived the Alamo and told everybody, the women there, those people are heroes too. And that was something I didn't know. I didn't know there were any survivors until I actually went there and perceived that room off to the right side of the mission there where the survivors the rest of the people...well a few people, when word got around the rest of the people of Texas, and that's when the term "remember the Alamo" was used up unto the movies out of Hollywood now. But still, that's important. And that's what I do, I talk about the heroes.

Do you have a favorite one you like to sing?

A favorite song I like to sing? That's like asking a parent what their favorite child is. That's like asking a teacher who their favorite student is. It varies from day to day.

I was just going to ask if you could tell a story about your favorite song.

Well, the Christmas ship is a song that I wrote a number of years ago about a schooner that would travel the Great Lakes, go up to Michigan, get a load of evergreen trees, come down to Chicago, and the captain would sell trees to the public. And what was interesting with that story...here again is a hero. The captain and the vessel went down in 1912 and it really hit Chicago hard. Many people would go down to the dock, buy the trees off the boat and knew the Shunemans, who was the captain, Herman Schuneman, knew the Schuneman family. And when the boat went down, then his wife took it upon herself to provide evergreen trees fro the city of Chicago and did for 22 years.

Did she go out on boats and get Christmas trees?

Well, actually what they would do, historically, they would go up in October and either purchase the trees from the Indians who lived up there, or they would cut them down themselves, this was the sailors, early on. In 1912, when the ship went down, all was lost, all the Christmas trees, there weren't very many Christmas trees that came in via ship that year. And the next year she did commission a vessel to bring the trees down. Now she was cut from a different mold, because she had ownership of a couple boats...this was 1905-1906 so she was a shrewd business person and had some clout. Now she couldn't vote but she did have some clout. Now she did travel on some of the trips. I don't think she was actually the captain. She would hire someone who knew, but she did travel, her and her twins..she had three children, two of them twins..did make the voyage a number of times. So she did travel, but I don't think she was as...that she knew intrinsically how to get a boat in and out of harbor or how to set sails for particular weather or how to trim sails or anything like that. Probably after three or four voyages she was a very observant and bright person, but I don't know. All I know is that she did bring trees down until the day that she died in one shape or another. Well, she died in 1935, and in 1930 the last schooner went down on Lake Michigan, so they had probably been training them in for many many years even after she died, but she was still responsible for bringing trees to the city of Chicago, and that's a hero. That's a real hero. That's someone you can look up to and I think that's my favorite.

I should have interviewed you just before Christmas I suppose.

(Laughs) Well, you know, whatever.

Those chanties, you were singing tonite, they come from the ocean tradition, don't they?

Yeah, many of them were deep water songs. The clipper ships of the 19^th century had fairly large crews compared to those on the Great Lakes, 30 or 40 people, and the whaling vessels had about that many. There was a lot of work that had to be done, and those people who were most efficient made the most money. And it just so happened...and this is not in the military vessels now, this is in the merchant vessels. The military vessels they didn't have singing, that wasn't allowed. That what musicians were for. But it just so happened that in the merchant vessels, those vessels that were most efficient, those vessels that made the most money happened to have singing crews, because when the people sang they got more work out of them. As Captain Fred Nelson said, "Ten men can outpull 20 with no song."

That's cute. And there were canal songs too?

There were some canal songs. Most of those were probably "pass the time songs" or what we would call "forbitters" or fo'c'sle" songs....ballads that would tell a story and not so much the work type, repetitious work, that you would have because most of the work was done by the mules hauling barges and all you had to do was make sure that when a bridge came around you had to duck your head otherwise you had to remember next time to duck your head. Cause the bridges were very low as a rule.

Low bridge...

Low bridge everybody down. You betcha.

I was going to ask you about your guitar, though I don't know very much about guitars. Anything interesting that you can say about guitar playing?

I can give you a little background on them. My six string guitar I was using this evening was made by a guy named Bojo Padunovich. He was originally of the Balkans...Serbia, Croatia...Yugoslavia. And came to this country after World War II, made instruments in Chicago. Beautiful six string steel string guitar. Acoustic. And the other one is a 12 string guitar made by a fellow names Jean Larive of British Columbia and it's a beautiful, beautiful guitar. His wife Wendy does all the inlay work and there are a lot of abalones that died because they had to be put on my guitar so there's a lot of pearl work on my guitars. They're both hand made and they're both one of a kind instruments.

Is there something about your style that's unusual?

I've had one guitar lesson in my life, but it was a very good one. His name was Paul Mende. He was a classical guitarist. I couldn't afford the lessons. I was unemployed. But in effect he gave me all my right hand technique. My right hand technique is classical. My left hand technique is less than classical, let's put it that way. I wrap my thumbs over and things like that. But I'm a finger style guitarist and I work in a number of tunings...also standard...and its just...well, let me put it this way. I'm a solo performer and I have to provide the bassline, the background and lead at the same time. And so that's my style, to be able to have that melody going, support that melody, and have a bassline going all at the same time. AKA in the style of Chet Atkins.

I guess most people are listening to what you're singing, though. You were out there saying, "This is the only place I can play..."you were playing rag?

Yeah, tonight I was doing Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" which was composed in 1902. For those of you who might not be familiar with that term, it was also the theme song for "The Sting." starring Paul Newman and the other guy...Robert Redford. But I play instrumental guitar music like the classical type stuff, I do that for my own enjoyment and to push myself on the instrument, so that I have a larger vocabulary of notes and technique to be able to embellish my arrangements of the songs. So I can do leads, do a melody, instead of take a break, so my audience can take a break from listening to words, you can just have a musical pause in there. And that's why I do it. Where on the Great Lakes, people want to hear the songs more...no its not that, I feel compelled to do the songs more, whereas if I come...If I go to the east coast or go to the west coast, or come down to the gulf coast area, then sometimes music is something everybody can get involved in as opposed to just singing songs from this place far away. Okay? I always try to do something that people can understand. The difference between the sun coming up over Lake Michigan in the City of Chicago, and the sun coming up in Corpus Christi, over the Gulf that's probably something that people can identify with. But sometimes if you do a lot of shipwreck songs its nice to break things up and that's why I put in that Joplin piece tonite just to give a little break.

Did people have instruments on board ships back in the old days?

Harmonicas, flutes...er little tin whistles, violin was probably the most popular sailor instrument. A few guitars. A few banjos. Mandolins were pretty popular. The smaller the better because there's not that much room on board ship.

Thanks very much for talking to me. You obviously have a great store of knowledge about the stuff up north in cold climates.

Thank you for taking the time to interview me. I'm just like those little pink rabbits, once you get me started I just keep on going and going and going....

write: gennett at gorge dot net

The Columbia Gypsy