A Saturday Evening Folktale

Cause nobody but a logger

Stirs his coffee with his thumb...

The Frozen Logger

A tall tale of the tall tree toppers

from the Northwest logging country

I sat down one evening

Within a small cafe

A forty year old waitress

To me these words did say:

"I see you are 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 it

He could eat a bale of hay.

He never shaved his whiskers

From off his horny hide;

He's just 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 that he broke my jaw;

I could not speak to tell him

He'd 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 clean through to China,

It froze to the stars above;

At a thousand degrees below zero

It froze my logger love.

And so I lost my lover,

And to this cafe I come,

And here I wait till someone

Stirs his coffee with his thumb.

Dashing through the snow at forty-eight below?
A Klondiker hauling logs with a dog sled team to Dawson
in the Yukon Territory
(c.1898)

"The Frozen Logger"
The Weavers

(1959)

"The Frozen Logger"

Words and Music by James Stevens

Copyright 1951 Folkways Music Publishers. Inc.

New York, N.Y.