On this concept album,
Pete Seeger performs folk songs collected by the Champlain Valley historian Marjorie L. Porter. Mrs. Porter learned the songs from a variety of aged people in her district, so that they tend to date from the 19th century, if not earlier, and they are concerned with various local subjects including the War of 1812, romance, and occupations including lumberjacking. Usually accompanying himself on the banjo,
Seeger sings in English and phonetic French (pausing during "Le Raftsmen [Mother Gauthier's]" to provide a rough English translation), that is when he's not chanting in a North American Indian dialect in "Seneca Canoe Song" or playing the fife for "Roslyn Castle" and "Boyne Water." Death and politics make appearances toward the end with the lively "Clara Nolan's Ball" followed by the luridly morbid "Young Charlotte" (in which a vain young woman refuses her mother's offer of a blanket on a carriage ride to a ball and freezes to death) and the closing song, "John Brown's Body," the tale of the abolitionist who tried to inspire a slave uprising shortly before the Civil War and was executed for his trouble. "His soul is marching on,"
Seeger sings. The song doesn't seem to have much to do with the Champlain Valley, but surely it was sung everywhere in the North in the Civil War era and, like the rest of this music, evokes a vanishing history, stirringly rendered.