Pioneering scholar of occupational folksong. Born in Rogers, Arkansas, Rickaby was
raised in Springfield, Illinois, where he distinguished himself as a poet and a musician.
He received a B.A. from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, in 1916 and an M.A. in
English literature from Harvard University in 1917. From 1917 through spring 1923,
Rickaby was an instructor at the University of North Dakota. He taught subsequently at
Pomona College, Claremont, California, from 1923 until 1925, when he died at thirtyfive of heart failure—a consequence of rheumatic fever.
Rickaby did not study die ballad at Harvard under Francis James Child’s disciple
George Lyman Kittredge. Rather, work with regional arts in North Dakota and a summer
job in Charlevoix, Michigan, brought familiarity with what he called a “cultural frontier”
wherein ballads flourished. He developed a “comparative balladry” course in 1919 and
began collecting ballads on field trips and through students. His papers reveal 243
folksongs gadiered, with variants from singers in Nordi Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin,
and Michigan.
Rickaby’s posthumous Ballads and Songs of the ShantyBoy, published in 1926,
includes fifty-one texts, most accompanied by tunes. His “Introduction” and notes
provide our first rich glimpse of lumber-camp singers, their performance style, their
ethnic diversity, and the social meaning of their songs. Rickaby’s book also mentions his
critical reliance on three untrained logger-folklorists (William C.Bartlett, Michael
Cassius Dean, and Otto Rindlisbacher) and offers a fine sketch of ballad-maker William
N.Allen (alias “Shan T. Boy”), many of whose woods poems were published in The
Hodag.
James P.Leary
References
Bardett, William C. 1929. History, Tradition, and Adventure in the Chippewa Valley. Chippewa
Falls, WI: Chippewa Printery.
Dean, Michael Cassius. 1922. The Flying Cloud, and One Hundred and Fifty Other Old Time
Songs and Ballads. Virginia, MI: Quickprint.
Greene, Daniel W. 1968. “Fiddle and I”: The Story of Franz Rickaby. Journal of American
Folklore 82:316–336.
Kearney, Lake Shore. 1928. The Hodagand Other Tales of the Logging Camps. Wausau, WI:
Democrat Printing.
Rickaby, Franz. ca. 1925. Ballads collected by Franz Rickaby. 7 vols. In Wisconsin Music
Archives, Mills Music Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison.
——. 1926. Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
——. 1977. 1919: Franz Rickaby in the Field. In Folksongs Out of Wisconsin, ed. Harry Peters.
Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, pp. 17–22.
Rindlisbacher, Otto. 1931. Twenty Original Reels, Jigs, and Hornpipes. Rice Lake, WI: Rice Lake
Chrontopye.