The Story

Sidney Robertson Cowell was a talented writer who told her stories better than anyone.
Click on the symbol throughout the text to read her accounts of her collecting in Wisconsin.

Mrs. and Mrs. Robert Walker of Crandon, Wisconsin, ca. 1937. Photo by Sidney Robertson Cowell. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Used with permission.

Song catcher Sidney Robertson was lured to the Wisconsin Northwoods in 1937 by the prospect of finding “Kaintucks,” woodsmen who had followed the lumber industry up from Kentucky to Wisconsin. When large-scale logging died out in the state, the lumber companies moved their camps to Idaho and the Pacific Northwest. “Too old and discouraged,” many of these transplanted workers did not want to move yet again, Sidney said.

Concentrated in the Rhinelander and Crandon area, these lumberjacks brought with them the old-time music of the Appalachian Mountains. And on weekends throughout the summer of 1937, Robertson would make several trips to north-central Wisconsin to seek out those songs. Not only did she find a trove of lumberjack tunes, but she also captured rare French-Canadian fiddle tunes and dramatic historical ballads about everything from the sinking of the Titanic to the end of prohibition. In all she captured almost 50 tunes in Wisconsin, which reside in the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress.

Robertson began collecting songs in Wisconsin while working for the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration formed in 1935. RA was a New Deal initiative aimed at relocating impoverished farm families and poor city families devastated by the Depression. To soothe tensions within these artificially created communities, the government set upon folksong as a means of unifying the people. A lead proponent for making folksong central in resettlement was ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger, who headed up efforts for the Special Skills division. This initiative sent a fleet of fieldworkers, including Robertson (Seeger’s assistant), into rural American to capture the nation’s unique musical tradition. The Special Skills division eventually folded and Robertson was transferred to the Farm Security Administration, which carried on much of the Division’s work. By this time there was government interest in song collecting but no money for it. At the time of the Wisconsin recordings, Robertson was stationed out of Austin, Minnesota as a relief worker helping Resettlement clients adjust to community life. Song collecting was done on weekends and during short leaves.

Leizime Brusoe with his loving cup in a WLS radio publicity photo, ca. 1930. Photo courtesy of Bruce Brusoe.

Robertson’s first recording trip to the Rhinelander-Crandon area was in July to capture more tunes from champion fiddle player Leizime Brusoe, whom she first recorded months earlier at the 4th National Folk Festival in Chicago in May 1937. She described him as “a fine old fiddler who can’t read a note, who used to play for dancing school in Quebec 40 years ago—quadrilles, etc., some of them the ancestors of southern fiddle tunes.” On other collecting trips to the area, Robertson set up her huge recorder in the side rooms of bars or at “a small match-box of a cabin on a perfectly round, tiny lake, grassy on my side and fringed with pine to the water’s edge across from me…” she wrote. “Most of the oddest and most interesting specimens among the jacks and Kaintucks came to see me and sing and tell stories.”

Yet it wasn’t a Kaintuck who would prove to have the best ballad recall. Warde Ford, a New York State transplant to Wisconsin, had a keen memory and could sometimes recite a song after hearing it only once. Robertson’s 1937 recordings of Ford would mark the beginning of a fifteen-year folksong relationship that would go on at intervals in Wisconsin, California, and in Berlin, Germany. Robertson estimates that she recorded around 200 songs from Ford, “at least two-thirds of them long ballads about historical events.”

Warde Ford, just before leaving Crandon for California, ca. 1938. Photo by Sidney Robertson Cowell. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. Used with permission.

She first met Ford in the county welfare office, where she had gone to find leads on out-of-work Kentucky loggers. She explained to Ford, a temporary clerk in the office, that she was on the hunt for old songs. He said he knew some and would gather them that evening. It was only after two or three trips to Crandon that Robertson discovered that Ford was a singer himself. He had been too shy to reveal his abilities, as he explained to her, she hadn’t asked him directly.

Robertson spent so much time collecting songs from Ford that she was known around Crandon as his "girlfriend." He had different jobs around town, including one looking after horses owned by the wife of the local undertaker. A few times Robertson would join Ford in the barn, with her typewriter on a coffin, so that he could dictate texts while polishing the saddles. One of their most vivid collaborations occurred during a long car trip where the singer sang almost the entire trip without repeating the same song twice.