Our Singing Country
Complete Text, Lyrics & Sheet Music
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Our Singing Country |
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THE B1GLER
A to 5b. No. 2323,4.. Tune and part of text from Capt. Asel Trueblood, St. Ignace, Mich., 1939. Remainder of text from R. F. Hasbrook, Bessemer, Mich. See Col, p. 200$ Ri, p. 168.
"I learned this song a good fifty years ago. I was twenty-three at the time. Pve walked the old Bigler's decks many times though I never sailed on her. She was supposed to he the slowest vessel in the fleet, and of course they had winds and all that and she}d bile along like everything hut the other vessels would beat her. They stopped many places on the way down, and a new verse was composed about every place they stopped in and every place they}d pass. And when they got down in Lake Erie, before they got to Buffalo, they met the fleet coming back.
"I knew this feller that composed this song about the Bigler, but I forgot his name. It was a kind of a joky song like, because they got beat. He said they'd V beat the fleet if the fleet had V hove to. The places they stopped in were the whorehouses on the way down, and they*d get in there drinkiny beer and singin' this song, and it bought }em a lot of free beers."
—Captain Asel Trueblood.
"The best known song that came out of the lumber trade on the lakes is the well-known 'Timber-Drover Bigler\ . . . The schooner Bigler, which was evidently carrying a cargo of grain on the trip narrated in the song, was a blunt-nosed, clumsy canaller that was slow and hard to steer. . . . The 'juberju* mentioned in the chorus has been variously described as the jib boom, the rajfee yard, and the crossfire, upon which the sailors at times climbed to ride the halliard down to the deck. . . .}}
—Ivan H. Walton3 University of Michigan. |
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