'The Wreck of the Julie Plante'

'The Wreck of the Julie Plante'. A dialect poem subtitled 'A Legend of Lac St. Pierre' by William Henry Drummond, published in his The Habitant and Other Poems in 1897. May Harvey Drummond in her unpublished biography of her husband describes him writing the verse ca1879. In the ensuing years it circulated orally, a version of the text appearing in the Winnipeg Siftings in September 1886. As a song the words (with variations) and music (of unidentified origin) were included in The McGill University Song Book in 1896. Folklorists found it spread widely. The migrant lumberjacks carried it as a song to many camps, and Franz Rickaby included a fragment in his Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy (Cambridge, Mass 1926), noting that the singer, from eastern Ontario, described it as 'a "Canuck'' song, very popular among the French-Canadian shantyboys.' E.C. Beck (Songs of the Michigan Lumberjacks, Ann Arbor 1948) heard it from at least nine lumberjacks in Michigan and Wisconsin, some changing 'Lac St. Pierre' (on the St Lawrence River between Montreal and Quebec) to 'Lak San Clair' (between Lake Erie and Lake Huron). Two of the published tunes are of folk origin. The tune used in Fowke and Johnston's Folk Songs of Canada (Waterloo 1954) comes from Rickaby; that in the McGill University Song Book is similar to the one sung in Manitoba by Rev. C. W. Gordon ('Ralph Connor'), who as early as 1885 served in missions in the Canadian west. The poem has been set to new tunes by H.H. Godfrey (1899), Herbert Spencer (Delmar 1907), and Geoffrey O'Hara (Ditson 1920) in choral and solo-voice versions.