The Frozen Logger

Out in the Northwest logging country, in backwoods towns like Ohop, Duckabush and Cle Elum, the jukeboxes were booming last week with a new song that seemed ground out on Paul Bunyan's grindstone--the one that was so big that every time it turned three times it was payday again.

As narrated by the Weavers to a homely little melody, there was a logger who could eat baled hay if someone sprinkled it with whisky. One night when it froze clean through to China, he started off home without his mackinaw. At 100 below, he just buttoned his vest. But at 1,000 below, he froze solid. His sweetheart finally got tired of waiting for him, and went looking for another man who stirred his coffee with his thumb.

The new rage of the Northwest, 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."

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