TAUNY - News

TAUNY Publications in Regional Folkways will release its latest book project One Rough Life - Ted Ashlaw: Adirondack Lumber Camp and Barroom Singer by Robert Bethke on June 6, 2018. In celebration of the release, the community is invited to a book release party at The TAUNY Center in Canton, NY on Wednesday, June 6 from 5:00-7:00 pm. The evening will include a chance to meet author Robert Bethke and learn more about this project. Light refreshments will be served. Starting on June 6th, One Rough Life can be purchased at TAUNY’s North Country Folkstore or online at tauny.org/shop. This project was made possible with support from the Canton Community Fund.

One Rough Life is the first book to provide a folklore fieldwork case study, accompanied by two CDs, devoted to a career-long Adirondack logger and traditional, non-commercial singer of ballads and other songs circulated in lumber camp bunkhouses and barrooms from the early 1900s through the early 1950s. Ted Ashlaw, a northern New York State logger born in a lumber camp in 1905, worked and lived that “rough life.” Robert Bethke’s concise yet detailed account of the man, his occupational experience, his song lyrics, and on the CDs his unaccompanied singing confirm Ashlaw’s place among the well-documented traditional folk singers of the Adirondacks and neighboring Ontario, Canada. The book and CDs draw upon the author’s field collecting during in the 1970s.

Robert D. (Bob) Bethke, Ph.D in Folklore and Folklife, taught for thirty years in the Department of English at the University of Delaware. The author of numerous publications, and the book Adirondack Voices (1981), which first introduced readers to Ted Ashlaw, he is now retired and living in Venice, Florida. A longtime member of the American Folklore Society, in 2001 he received the Evergreen Award from TAUNY for his continuing professional contributions to understanding and appreciation of traditional cultures, arts, and artists of the North Country of New York State.

“Bob Bethke’s 1981 book called Adirondack Voices about the storytelling and music making traditions of Adirondack woodsmen of past generations has long been considered a classic, one of the best documentations of its kind about a vanished art. One Rough Life is as good or even better since it’s an in-depth study of one talented singer in the local tradition with a great repertoire and equally great style. Ted Ashlaw was one of the last of the men left to tell about such a life. This book captures the rich stories in ways both informative and entertaining. Bethke’s excellent field recordings, captured nearly 50 years ago, have been enhanced for this project, making the 35 recorded songs on 2 accompanying CDs a genuine bonus” says folklorist and TAUNY Founding Director, Varick Chittenden.

“In One Rough Life, the reader will appreciate once more the American song traditions that were such an important part of life in the lumber camps and in the daily experiences of local singers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” says Jennifer C. Post of the University of Arizona, author of Music in Rural New England Family and Community Life, 1870-1940. Adds the University of Wisconsin's James P. Leary, editor of Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era, “Robert Bethke offers us one fine book, and a pair of powerful CDs, deftly revealing the experiences and songs of Ted Ashlaw, whose One Rough Life—rendered with erudition, unflinching candor, and affection—exemplifies the last generation of lumberjack singers.”

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