New album celebrates Minnesota lumberjack songs

Lumberjack songs
Brian Miller, foreground, and Randy Gosa perform Irish music from north woods lumber camps Monday, Mar. 25, 2013 at MPR studios in St. Paul.
MPR Photo/Jennifer Simonson

Twin Cities musician and scholar Brian Miller has been discovering and preserving the songs that lumberjacks in the northern Minnesota woods were singing in the 19th century.

On a new recording, "The Falling of the Pine," Miller and Randy Gosa perform a selection of those songs. Several of them come from a songbook by a man named Michael Dean, who was a lumberjack, farmer and saloon keeper in Hinckley from 1885 to 1906. They're not all about logging. This one is about baseball which was all the rage in Hinckley at the time.

Miller and Gosa will perform Friday, Oct. 11 at the Hinckley Fire Museum in Hinckley, Minn. On Saturday, Oct. 12 they will play at a CD release party at the Celtic Junction in St. Paul.

Create a More Connected Minnesota

MPR News is your trusted resource for the news you need. With your support, MPR News brings accessible, courageous journalism and authentic conversation to everyone - free of paywalls and barriers. Your gift makes a difference.