When the Irish moved to Minnesota, they brought their music.

Brian Miller, a 1998 Bemidji High School graduate, recently shared his fascination with the history and songs of northern Minnesota with the

Headwaters Center for Lifelong Learning.

“I’m an archivist and librarian as well as a musician,” he told those in the audience on Tuesday, Oct. 17.

Miller has spent the past 15 years doggedly tracking down lyrics and melodies from the area’s logging era.
As it turns out, the roots of folk singing in Minnesota have a strong connection to Ireland.

“Everything I do has an Irish flavor. That’s the music that I fell in love with, strangely, when I was growing up in Bemidji — traditional Irish music,” Miller said.

And this story begins in Akeley.

During the 1800s — before the emergence of iTunes or Spotify — people carried about 150 to 200 songs in their head, Miller explained.

In the 1920s, “Adventure” was a popular magazine. Typically, it printed syndicated Jack London stories about the Yukon Gold Rush “or how to wrestle a crocodile, if you had to,” Miller said of the 25-cent publication.

That’s where he discovered a column, entitled “Old Songs That Men Have Sung,” in the very back pages of an October 1922 issue.

“One of the avid readers was a man named Reuben Waitstell Phillips who lived in Chamberlain, here in Hubbard County. It’s a bit of a ghost town on Highway 64 now,” Miller said, but Phillips is buried in White Oak Cemetery, along with his brother Seymour and son Israel.

“All three were singers, and Reuben sent in a handwritten manuscript of all the songs he knew to the editor of ‘Adventure’ magazine,” Miller said.

They were printed over the course of several months.

Miller sang one of them during his presentation, called “Lovel.” It’s based on a song originating in the 1650s about Patrick Flemming, a Robin Hood-like persona in Ireland. Over the centuries, the song evolved, using different names.

There were no musical notes with these lyrics, “but I’m a very tenacious researcher,” Miller said. He eventually located a collection of wax cylinder recordings of Phillips and other Minnesotan singers. Recorded by Robert Winslow Gordon in 1924, they are stored in an archive of American folk music at the Library of Congress.

Miller got a grant to have the 45 songs digitized. He listened to the scratchy recordings “probably “200 times.”

“That’s how I know how this song goes, but it wasn’t that easy to hear,” he said, adding they were often sung without instrumental accompaniment, so he made up the chords. “It was a really fun process. I find it really gratifying to try to bring the whole thing to life.”

Akeley’s Red River Lumber Company was in its heyday during Phillips’ time.

Miller shared a logging camp tune, “What a Time on the Way,” that was sung by Israel Phillips.

Lumberjacks entertained themselves by singing in the winter evenings, sitting on a “deacon seat” inside the shanty.

“And there was a lot of atmosphere, with guys that took a bath once a month and ate mostly beans,” Miller said.

While interning at the Minnesota Historical Society, he came across Napoleon Nadeau’s photo collection.

Nadeau worked for the forest service, Miller said, and took a few photos of this area. He scoured through Nadeau’s photos, finding some taken in Hubbard County’s logging camps.

“You get a feel for how young a lot of the loggers were,” he added.

A shared culture was created by the railroad, logging and canal-digging industries across the Great Lakes, Miller said.

The jobs were seasonal and physically demanding. And dangerous.

“They were jobs done by immigrants,” he continued. “The Irish were the first big, noticeable wave of European immigrants of the 1800s.”

With bouzouki in hand, Miller sang “Lovely Minnesoty.” It was printed in the “Journal of Minnesota History” around the 1930s or 1940s. The tune was collected in the Minnesota River valley, where there were a lot of Irish communities.

John Ireland, the first Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Paul, “was trying to make Minnesota as Catholic as possible,” Miller said. “He was bringing people from the west coast of Ireland and plopping them on the prairie, which didn’t always work well. Whoever made this song up had a healthy sense of Minnesotan sarcasm about the weather and living here.”

The lyrics claim it never snows, fish jump into your boat and forests yield 30-point bucks, here “in the lovely Minnesoty, the lily of the west.”

A bouzouki is a traditional Greek instrument that would normally have a round back but was adopted by the Irish and altered.

“It’s a hybrid between a bouzouki and a guitar,” Miller explained.

Hank Underwood (1864-1937) traveled around Minnesota, wooing crowds with his baritone voice. He’s remembered in historian J. C. Ryan’s book “Early Loggers in Minnesota.”

Ryan writes, “He was very popular in the Bemidji and Deer River areas. … He went from camp to camp singing for the jacks in order to keep their morale up and sang everything from popular to classical songs.”

Miller added, “In his later years, he used to work at Itasca Park, in the 1930s when it was just getting started.”

He has yet to find a photo of Underwood, though.

Underwood’s songs were preserved thanks to Franz Rickaby, a Harvard graduate and an English professor at the University of North Dakota. Rickaby transcribed the lyrics.

Underwood hung out at his brother’s hotel in Kelliher, the Solway Hotel. He also sang in downtown Bemidji outside of the Kelliher Hotel.

Miller said, “In one of the Vandersluis books, they say crowds used to gather to hear him sing and the cops would have to come and break them up.”

Known as “the songbird of lumberjacks,” Miller said people clustered next to Underwood at church because “he had a voice that could quiet the angels.”

Underwood may have had a brief show business career, although the truth is “kinda hazy.” It’s said he performed with Haverly’s United Mastodon Minstrels and Fanny Davenport, Miller said.

His last appearance was at the 1937 unveiling of Bemidji’s Paul Bunyan statue. He died a week later.

Miller sang “Banks of the River Plain,” a song that Underwood would know.

Miller teaches at the Center of Irish Music in St. Paul. Read his Northwoods Songs Blog at

www.evergreentrad.com.