Music Traditions of Beaver Island, Michigan

Please see Chapter 11 in this volume for biographical information on Laurie Kay Sommers. The following essay is adapted from her 1996 book Beaver Island House Party, for which Sommers relied extensively on the accounts of numerous islanders and the collections and field notes of the late Ivan Walter and Helen Collar.

Beaver Island is the largest island in Lake Michigan, located nineteen miles off the northwest Michigan coastal town of Cross Village. The island sustains a year-round population of about 450, 35 percent of whom are Irish, and a seasonal population of around 4,000. Irish immigrants settled the island beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. They were preceded by Native Americans, some of whom still lived on Beaver and surrounding islands when the first Irish arrived, and by the Mormon colony of James Jesse Strang from 1847 to 1856.

Most of the Irish came via chain migration from the small, rugged island of Arranmore located off the northwest coast of County Donegal. At the time of peak emigration in the middle to late nineteenth century, most islanders were uneducated, devout Catholics who spoke Irish rather than English. Through the Depression, the island fostered an economy based on fishing, farming, and logging. Significant change began with World War II. At present the chief industry is tourism, and most jobs are in construction, real estate, and services to year-round residents and resorters.

The dominant music culture derives from the interplay between Irish immigrant culture, the occupational folksong traditions of Great Lakes schoonermen and lumberjacks, popular culture via the mass media, and the regional traditions of the Upper Great Lakes. Much of Beaver Island's musical interest lies in the scope and time-depth of its field documentation. Island material is the centerpiece of the premiere collection of early twentieth-century Great Lakes ballads and song, collected by folklorist and University of Michigan English professor Ivan Walton from 1932 through 1960. The Beaver Island portion of Walton's collection includes data from a joint field trip with Alan Lomax in 1938. Additional material was collected by island summer resident Helen Collar from the 1960s through 1996 and by the author since 1989.

The documentation reveals a fascinating history of music making, house parties, dances, and other home entertainment. The older Irish instrumental and ballad repertoire has been supplanted over time by classic country, square and round dance instrumentals, newly composed local ballads, Irish music learned from recordings, rock and roll standards, and songs by contemporary singer-songwriter Claudia Schmidt, who now makes her home on the island. This article, however, focuses on music making by Beaver Island Irish and their descendants.

REPERTOIRES OF MUSIC

Through the 1930s, Irish immigrant survivals distinguished Beaver Island from the surrounding region even though the islanders also readily adopted popular culture and regional traditions of the United States. Much interchange occurred on sailing vessels and in ports of the Great Lakes as well as in lumber camps, where islanders swapped songs with men from various ethnic and national backgrounds. Islanders also wrote a number of songs about local events and characters and continue to cherish their singers and songmakers, keeping copies of song texts or poems made up by a relative and handing them down from generation to generation.

The older singers recorded by Walton and Lomax sang unaccompanied ballads and spoke the last verse of their song in the Irish style. In later years islanders added guitar accompaniment and eliminated the more modal Irish repertoire. Today, the local Great Lakes ballad "Lost in Lake Michigan" is the only ballad from the Walton/Lomax collection still actively performed on the island. The old Irish ballads have been replaced by a new group of Irish songs learned from visitors, acquired during trips to Ireland, and heard on commercial recordings. Locally composed parodies or songs about island characters also continue to thrive. In addition, residents are writing new ballads—such as Barry Pischner's "Raymond" and "Big Bradley"—about Great Lakes shipwrecks of local interest. Perhaps the most popular song

genre, however, is country-western, especially classic country from the 1950s.

The instrumental music recorded by Walton and Lomax was all dance music, and the Irish love of dancing continued on Beaver Island. The strong European influence on nineteenth-century American vernacular culture, combined with the cultural transplants of earlier generations of Irish and other European immigrants, meant that variants of Irish jigs and square and round dances already were established in the house parties, lumber camps, and community dance halls of the Upper Great Lakes by the time the Irish first arrived in the mid-1850s. The relative isolation of Beaver Island, however, contributed to a dance style that differed from the mainland.

The first generations of Beaver Island Irish were great step dancers. Fiddlers, mouth organ players, and even lilters provided the music, usually alternating jigs with square and round dances. Current dance styles include round dances, country two-steps, and a derivative of the old step dancing styles combined with the Polish-style polka called "jigging" or the "Beaver Island stomp." The country standard "Just Because" is a popular "jig tune" today. Music is provided by various combinations of guitar, electric bass, drum set, piano, and mouth organ. Fiddlers are highly prized, but no islander plays fiddle; they import one from the mainland when they can. Since the mid-1970s, most dances in Holy Cross Parish Hall have been organized by island piano, guitar, and mouth organ player, Edward Palmer. They begin with "On the Beach on Beaver Island," by islander Jewell Gillespie (a variant of "On the Beach at Waikiki"), and close with Danny Gillespie's rendition of "Danny Boy."

From the beginning, music and dance on Beaver Island occurred in association with holidays, paid-admission dances, and house parties modeled on Irish céilis. Since the 1940s, the tradition of "going around the island" in automobiles has replaced most older-style house parties. The key elements of storytelling, drink, music, and socializing remain intact. Holidays and family celebrations always have been occasions for dances. Today, the major island celebrations, St. Patrick's Day and Homecoming, both occur as benefits held in Holy Cross Parish Hall in St. James.

IDEAS ABOUT MUSIC

"It's not a song unless it's sad" is a prevalent belief among islanders. Americans in general selected the sad songs from the British ballad tradition, and the southern hillbilly music that grew out of these roots also featured mournful, lonesome themes. Not surprisingly, Beaver Islanders raised on the Carter Family and Grand Ole Opry radio broadcasts now sing sad country songs in lieu of the old ballads.

Ivan Walton captured another key island aesthetic, observing that the islanders retained the Irish "penchant for sociability; drinking, dancing, and singing seem to have been their chief source of enjoyment." This remains perhaps the most "Irish" characteristic on the island today. A good party lasts to the wee hours and is laced with plenty of drink and nostalgia. In a true "Beaver Island-style" party today, the musicians strive to create an atmosphere in which the elders can hear the tunes of their youth, the island's veteran dancers will do a waltz or a jig, and the younger generation can learn island traditions. A core repertoire of country-western, round, and square dance tunes are now traditionalized as "Beaver Island music" and helps to define islander identity.

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MUSIC

Major social occasions involve the entire community, although certain age and social groups hold their own parties. The island's overwhelming historic Catholicism led to friction with a small Protestant minority that affected patterns of socializing and music making during the earlier period; intermarriage and time have since broken down this division.

Most instrumentalists have been men. In keeping with prevailing social norms regarding women and instruments, women traditionally have played organ in church or chorded piano accompaniment. These norms of middle-class and religious respectability no longer hold such sway, but most dance band performers continue to be male. Two of the major historic singing contexts, Great Lakes sailing and lumber camps, were linked to male occupations, and thus Walton's field recordings, which reflected his interest in sailor songs, have predominantly male informants. Women more often sang at home for their families, for each other, or at house parties. Again, these gender distinctions are less strong today.

DOCUMENTARY RECORDINGS

The original Ivan H. Walton papers and sound recordings (1930–1958) are housed in the Michigan Historical Collections of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Copies of the Walton material plus the original Alan Lomax recordings from 1938 are housed at the Archive of Folksong, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

MUSIC TRADITIONS OF BEAVER ISLAND, MICHIGAN

REPERTOIRES OF MUSIC

IDEAS ABOUT MUSIC

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION OF MUSIC

DOCUMENTARY RECORDINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY