Frozen Logger, The

DESCRIPTION: The singer meets a waitress. She recognizes him as a logger, and tells him the sad tale of her amazing logger lover. One night he forgot his Mackinaw, and at last, "at a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love."
AUTHOR: James Stevens (1892-1971)
EARLIEST DATE: 1951
KEYWORDS: love logger death talltale
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (7 citations):
Lomax-FolkSongsOfNorthAmerica 61, "The Frozen Logger" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lingenfelter/Dwyer/Cohen-SongsOfAmericanWest, pp. 508-509, "The Frozen Logger" (1 text, 1 tune)
Silber/Silber-FolksingersWordbook, p. 30, "The Frozen Logger" (1 text)
Averill-CampSongsFolkSongs, p. 234, "The Frozen Logger" (notes only)
DT, FROZLOGR*
ADDITIONAL: Walker D. Wyman, _Wisconsin Folklore_, University of Wisconsin Extension (?), 1979, pp. 35-36, has a version, quite different from the Weavers text, which he apparently thinks is traditional folklore
Tom Nash and Twilo Scofield, _The Well-Travelled Casket: Oregon Folklore_, Meadowlark Press, 1999, pp. 65-66, "The Frozen Logger" (1 text, 1 tune)
Roud #5470
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Grizzly Hogan" (theme of the logger breaking his girlfriend's jaw when kissing her)
cf. "The Logger's Sweetheart" (tune, ideas)
NOTES [564 words]: There is a good deal of uncertainty about the author of this. Not that there is any question that the author's name was pronounced "James Stevens"; all seem to agree on this. But different sources have spelled it "Stevens" or "Stephens."
Research by Abby Sale and others supports the theory that the author was the James Stevens whose dates are cited above; he also wrote the classic book Paul Bunyan in 1925. The "Stephens" spelling may possibly be by confusion with the Irish author James Stephens.
Also, Nash/Scofield, p. 65, report that Stevens was not the sole author. Supposedly Steward Holbrook, H. L. Davis, and Stevens met at a writers' conference at Corvallis, Oregon, and "decided there were no Northwest loggers' songs that could be sung in mixed company." This was the result.
According to Sing Out!, Volume 37, #3 (1993), p. 72, Stevens based this on an actual lumberjack tall tale. But, of course, Stevens also claimed his Paul Bunyan stories come from that source -- and many of them clearly came out of his head. On the other hand, the following verse occurs in the song "Grizzly Hogan":
Once I had a sweetheart,
But I don't have her now.
I kissed her when I left her,
And it broke her lower jaw.
On the other hand, we can't prove that "Grizzly Hogan" predates "The Frozen Logger."
It may be questioned whether this is a folk song. I would not so count it, despite its inclusion in Lomax. Nonetheless, the versions have been folk processed to a certain extent -- notably in the first verse, where the original version read "A six foot seven waitress." Somebody (the Weavers?) converted this to the unremarkable "A forty year old waitress," and of course this has been common since, even though the line is banal and does nothing to enhance the tall tale aspects of the song.
The song at least became well enough known to inspire a widespread parody, "The Logger's Sweetheart," printed by Nash/Scofield from the singing on Bob Beers.
There is some interesting science (or, perhaps, lack of science) here. There is, of course, no such temperature as a thousand degrees below zero, in either the Fahrenheit or Celsius scales; Absolute zero is at -459.7 degrees Fahrenheit -- and anything not made of helium (which is everything more complex than a single atom) will have frozen rock-solid far warmer than that.
But it is in fact not unlikely that the logger was hard to freeze. Assume the logger's girl was, in fact, 79 inches tall. This would make her at least 15 inches taller than the average woman of Stevens's time. That's 23% taller. Presumably her lover is also about 23% taller than average. (For the time, that makes him an inch or two above seven feet.).
And that brings in what is called the "square-cube law" or "the law of squares and cubes": That the surface area of an shape increases as the square of its linear dimension, but the volume increases as the cube of its linear dimension. In simpler terms, as something gets bigger, its surface area gets smaller relative to its volume. By a lot.
Which is significant, because the heat generated by a body is roughly proportional to its volume, but heat loss is roughly proportional to surface area. The fact that the logger was very big did make him significantly less vulnerable to cold (though more vulnerable to heat). So while this is a tall tale, it's a little less tall than it might have been.- RBW
Last updated in version 6.6
File: LoF061

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