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Programs & Activities
Music & Dance
Lee Murdock
Singer
songwriter
Kaneville, Illinois
Joe
Grimm
Writer
Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
Great Lakes Folk Songs from the Ivan Walton
Collection
 During
the 19th-century age of sail, Great Lakes sailors sang an amazing number
of songs-work chanteys, amusement songs, songs about the iron ore and
lumber trades, about ships and crews, and of disasters and storms on the
Lakes. As this era waned and then nearly disappeared, it began to fascinate
University of Michigan literature and folklore professor Ivan H. Walton.
In the 1930s Walton began a two-decade-long search for these songs along
the shores of the Great Lakes, interviewing former sailors in gin mills
and union halls and on Beaver Island. Turning his massive collection of
songs, song fragments, notes, and letters into a book-length project was
not to happen in his lifetime; he retired and died before ever publishing
his life's work.
Enter Joe Grimm, an editor at the Detroit Free Press, who has long been
fascinated with Walton's collection of folk songs. Grimm took up Walton's
effort where Walton left off and in a "collaboration" of two
scholars who never met, published Walton's body of work in Windjammers:
Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors (2002). Grimm continues to chronicle
Walton's life and work in the new book Songquest: The Journals of Great
Lakes Folklorist Ivan H. Walton.
Equally enthralled by the beauty of Great Lakes sailing songs is Lee Murdock
(pictured here), whose musical talent regularly brings the songs Walton
collected to life today. Murdock not only contributed the musical scores
to many of the songs in Windjammers but more importantly, he performs
and interprets these songs. He has released twelve albums/CDs including
Lake Rhymes: Folk Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors with a songbook
for educators. Murdock's work is both a documentary of the sailors, fishermen,
lighthouse keepers, outlaws and everyday heroes of yesteryear as well
as an anthem to the people who live, work, learn and play along the shores
of the Great Lakes today.
Grimm and Murdock, together with folklorist Laurie Sommers, who documented
Walton's legacy and contemporary folk music in the community of Beaver
Island, will present in lively discussions and performances the songs
of the Ivan Walton collection and the exciting discoveries of historical
maritime research.
Links
http://www.leemurdock.com
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