When steam-powered vessels replaced white-winged schooners on the Great Lakes, an entire musical tradition nearly vanished with them. In the late 1930s, Ivan H. Walton—a University of Michigan professor of American literature and the leading authority on Great Lakes folklore—set out to preserve these songs before they were lost forever. He tracked down aging schoonermen in lakefront hospitals and waterfront haunts, reconstructing melodies and lyrics to over a hundred songs from memory and fragments.

Walton spent decades preparing this anthology but died in 1968 with the work unpublished. Detroit Free Press editor Joe Grimm completed the project, combining Walton’s research with musical scores by folksinger and historian Lee Murdock. The collection includes work shanties, story songs, disaster ballads, and songs of Beaver Island—many unheard for over a century.