May 22, 2003

Plains Folk: Sod Shanties

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

To my knowledge no one ever collected any royalties, so rival claims to authorship of the Great Plains folksong, "Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim," are about honor, not riches. The song was sung from Texas to Alberta. Its reputed authors are spangled across the same states and provinces.

Roger Welsh, the well-known Nebraska folklorist, told me he maintains a list of people who claimed, or whose descendants now claim, they wrote "Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim." In my native state of Kansas I have corresponded with descendants of Everett Calvin Motz, who lived at several places in the western part of the state, including Selden. He had a cabinet-card photo made of himself with the song printed on the back. Family members say he wrote it.

Friends in Grafton, N. D., have given me papers documenting the claim that one Henry A. Ball wrote the song from his experiences homesteading in Walsh County in 1883. Ball became a well-known citizen of Grafton, being an active Mason and, at the time of his death in 1925, the city's last Union Army veteran. His local biographer says, "Henry later claimed that this song had been stolen by someone else, evidently it hadn't been copyrighted."

Just over at Devils Lake, though, was another claimant. An early booklet of the Devils Lake Region Pioneers Association prints three stanzas and a chorus of "Little Old Sod Shanty" attributed to one Will Kelsey.

The song was not exactly original anywhere on the plains. All versions derive from the 1871 published song by Will S. Hays, "Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane." That song in turn derived from the old English gospel song, "Lily of the Valley."

What all the Great Plains versions have in common are a collection of images (coyotes, mice, leather hinges, blizzards) and a set of assumptions. The assumptions are that the author lives in a developing country, a homesteading frontier, where things are slapdash and temporary, but that pretty soon, the sod house will give way to progress and good frame residences.

Those assumptions, though, I have come now to question. Maybe the old sod house was not so temporary after all. My research in the clippings collections of the Kansas State Historical Society tells me that there were at least scores of sod houses serving as residences in the mid-twentieth century. People put gabled roofs on them, put in floors and windows, plastered the interiors, stuccoed the exteriors, and found they had good, tight dwellings suitable for the plains.

My friend Molly Rozum, who wrote her master's thesis on sod houses in South Dakota, confirms that the sod house was not just a temporary device. People lived -- and live -- in them for generations.

I got to thinking about this while documenting several sod houses in Bowman County, N. D., including one, in the little town of Haley, still occupied. That was when I added my name to the lengthening list of authors of "Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim." (Web users, see my text here: www.plainsfolk.com/songs/song10.htm )

My chorus goes, "Oh the window-wells are deep / For the walls are two feet thick / The howling blizzard cannot do us harm. / In the summertime we're cooler than the willows by the creek / In our little old sod shanty on the farm." And my version is, indeed, copyrighted.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu 

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