FROZEN LOGGER

The” Frozen Logger” was written by a onetime mule skinner, hobo poet and bull cook

named Jim Stevens, one of the first men to set the tall tales of Paul Bunyan down on

paper (1925). He wrote the lyrics in 1928, borrowed the melody of an old ballad to go

with them. He finally got it published last year, and the folk-singing Weavers picked it up

and boosted it into popularity. So much popularity, says Stevens, 59, that “I hear some of

the boys in the woods are beginning to use their thumbs in the coffee again.”

As I sat down one evening, within a small cafe

A forty year old waitress to me these words did say

I see that you’re a logger, and not just a common bum

‘Cause nobody but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb

My lover was a logger, there’s none like him today

If you’d pour whiskey on him, he’d eat a bale of hay

He never shaved his whiskers from off his horny hide

He’d drive them in with a hammer, and bite them off inside

My lover came to see me, upon one freezing day

He held me in a fond embrace which broke three vertebrae

He kissed me when we parted, so hard he broke my jaw

I could not speak to tell him, he forgot his mackinaw

I saw my lover leaving, sauntering through the snow

Going gaily homeward at forty-eight below

The weather it tried to freeze him, it tried its level best

At a hundred degrees below zero, he buttoned up his vest

It froze clear through to China, it froze the stars above

At a thousand degrees below zero, it froze my logger love

They tried in vain to thaw him, and would you believe me, sir

They made him into axeblades, to chop the Douglas fir

And so I lost my lover, to this cafe I come

And here I wait till someone stirs his coffee with his thumb

Banjo Mountain