by permission of the Detroit Free Press:

MICHIGAN'S TROUBADOUR:
Veteran tunesmith, folk historian given honorary title from state

July 3, 2003

BY SHERYL JAMES
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER

So come all ye wood scow shantey boys, take a lesson from that storm

Marry you a nice French girl and live on the Grosse Pointe farm

Then the wind can blow like a hurricane, by and by she blow some more

But you never get drowned in Lake St. Clair as long as you stay on shore

That is the last verse of "The Wreck of the Julie Plante." It is a late 1800s song that should have vanished long ago, along with the French girls and the Grosse Pointe farms it depicts.

This is also true of "The Ballad of the Frozen Logger," a tall-tales lumberjack song that should have disappeared with Michigan's old-growth forests:

As I sat down one morning in a small cafe A 40-year-old waitress to me these words did say:

"I see you are a logger, and not a common bum

For no one but a logger stirs his coffee with his thumb."

There are songs about Hobo John, who rode the rails; Big Rock Candy Mountain, where bulldogs have rubber teeth and jails are made of tin; and the Flat River girl, a blacksmith's daughter whose broken-hearted lover fled to the Muskegon River.

The characters come from earlier times and places long gone: lumber camps, Great Lakes schooners, empty rail cars, isolated farms, cowboy campfires.

Fortunately for Michiganders, the characters live on in Neil Woodward, a 51-year-old traveling musician who has spent most of his life finding, researching and playing songs like these on everything from tin whistles to mandolins.

Last week, Woodward, who lives in Cohoctah Township in Livingston County, was recognized in a unique way for preserving these traditions. The Legislature passed joint resolutions declaring him Michigan's troubadour. State Rep. Joe Hune, R-Fowlerville, presented the framed resolution to Woodward on Monday at the Livingston County Courthouse in Howell.

The troubadour idea originated with Woodward's wife of 30 years, Joan Abbey, who thought the honorary designation would make a great 51st birthday present. She contacted lawmakers, who liked the idea, too.

The honorary title recognizes Woodward's work while advancing the role of troubadour, which many know little about today. In the Middle Ages, troubadours were traveling musicians and storytellers, found especially in southern France and Italy.

"It's a huge honor," Woodward said, "but I'm thinking it's a huge responsibility. I'm not sure I understand it, but it feels like it fits."

It's difficult to imagine a better candidate for the title.

Grass roots and gritty
A narrowly built, 6-foot-4 man with long hair and straw hat, Woodward looks like a cross between his rough but authentic song characters and a member of ZZ Top.He is soft-spoken, sensitive, low-key. He is also a gifted musician.

Performing in places as varied as historical landmarks, classrooms, barn dances, theaters and radio and television studios, Woodward plays 6-string, 12-string and steel guitars; harmonica; mandolin; fiddle; banjo; autoharp; dulcimer, pennywhistle, ukulele and more.

"It depends on how you count them," Woodward said of his versatility. "I play a number of instruments, for instance, in the mandolin family. I don't know if you want to consider a mandola different from a mandolin or different from a mandocello. In that case, I really don't know how many instruments I play."

He's not even counting the "weird little things" such as a bowed psaltery (dulcimer family) and a concertina (related to the accordion).

Woodward seemed to evolve naturally into this work. He grew up in Dearborn. His father played mandolin; his mother was a pianist; two sisters were into musical theater. As a kid, he was so fascinated by the lyrics of "Home on the Range," he learned every verse. He started playing harmonica at about age 6; later came the trumpet and guitar, then involvement in garage bands during his years at Edsel Ford High School, from which he graduated in 1970.

College wasn't a consideration. "I just started trying to play music for a living," he said. His number in the military draft lottery helped: 356.

Eventually, Woodward followed his passion for traditional music. He loved the stories, the history, the language.

"It's very compelling, very stripped down, very restrained. Some of it can be very poetic or flowery, or it can be someone talking in real rough language. It's dependent upon who's telling the story."

Preserving the past
Woodward, who also writes his own material and has recorded seven CDs, performs at the Henry Ford in Dearborn regularly and is the village troubadour at Genesee County's Crossroads Village and Huckleberry Railroad.He has performed at northern Michigan campgrounds and historical sites at the invitation of the Michigan Humanities Council, and his efforts have been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Much of what he does involves educating audiences about the past, he said.

"You talk about the lumber era in Michigan, for instance. There was a whole lot of stuff going on in the Saginaw Valley. People were coming out here from the East when the Erie Canal opened up. You can actually go into a song written by somebody who was recruited in the East to come out here and work in the wintertime. They tell you what it was like to be sailing in the Saginaw Bay at that time. It just brings the whole thing to life."

Woodward has a reverence not just for the music but for those who created it and others who preserved it. He meticulously credits all sources in his CD "Old Timers," for example. The sources include 100-year-old anthologies and field recordings. One song turned up in an old newspaper clip buried beneath a rodeo man's saddle blanket, damp and dog-eared. Woodward adds his own notes.

He speaks of hornpipes, buck-dancing (a form of clogging) and button accordions, of long cold nights and fast-fingered fiddlers. Woodward describes one particularly poignant moment that underlines the value of his work. "When You and I Were Young" was a popular ballad in the 1880s, he writes. He learned the song from a sheet music publication of around 1876 that he found in an archive. He played the song at Crossroads Village one day.

"An elderly gentleman by the name of Vern had been listening intently while staring off into some unseen memories, the distance to which had apparently been successfully bridged by the music," Woodward wrote. After the last chord, "Vern reached for his handkerchief and murmured, 'I thought that song had run its course.' "

You can hear Neil Woodward sing on his Web site www.neilwoodward.com; click on "Disks."

Contact SHERYL JAMES at 810-923-1018 or sjames@freepress.com.