Top Fallers Song

In logging, the macho job is the top faller. He wears spikes on the sides of his boots, shinnies up those big firs and pines, throws a strap around, hooks it into a "D" ring on his belt, leans back, and chops the top off. If he's really good at it, when he's done he loosens the strap and jumps, falling with that strap still around the tree. He falls straight down, just like falling down an elevator shaft, and digs his cleats in about two feet above the ground. Scares the hell out of anybody watching it.

The pride of the top fallers was never taking those cleats off. If you ever go into a bar up in the Northwest, take a look at the floor. You can see if top fallers have been there, because there are holes in the floor, especially along the bar, and on the dance floor. Can you imagine what a bunch of top fallers do to a dance floor? Turn it into match sticks.

Logging was a way for a developer to get quick money. Held buy off the timer, then timber off the mountain as quick as he could. Of course, if he could keep his overhead down, he could keep his profits up. A logger used to have to carry his own blankets. He'd have to sleep in old sheds that had no heat, that had wormy old sacks of hay for mattresses. Very often, he'd have to buy his own tools, or held pay for tools through deductions from his pay, and very often never see those tools at all, because the foreman would be a swindler. A guy would put up with it, because if he didn't, he wouldn't be working there; held get no wages at all.

That's why the loggers were the first ones to become seriously interested in organizing as an industry, at every level, They were way out in the middle of nowhere, so they had to correct the conditions that made their lives hard right there on the spot. It was just too damned hard to go a hundred miles into town to hold a meeting, They had to do it right there, which meant that the organizers had to be very subtle people.

There was one guy, named Whitey, who used to work as a foreman. The boss would say, "There's going to be timber organizers in this camp, and it's your job to keep them out. " He would stage fights and brawls, like little theatrical productions, where they would eject somebody from the camp. Then they'd bring him back under cover of darkness. All the time he was doing that, he was putting up the little "silent agitators" all over the outhouses, little stickers with union sentiments on them. He was holding little meetings in the barracks at night, talking about the union Held be playing both sides of the wire.

One of the big depredations was scaling. The scaler measures what you cut. It's real easy to get cheated by a crooked scaler, the scaler with the "long thumb". One of the reasons for organizing a lumber camp is so you have control over who your scaler is, and you have controls on him.

I tried a lot of different kinds of tunes for this one, some of them rare and exotic, and I always came back to "Sweet Betsy from Pike", and it works real well.

When I go to town I hit the saloon,
And dance all around to the log driver's tune;
You'll always know where a top faller's been
By the holes in the floor and the ladies who grin,

Then I sleep it off in a broken down shed,
Wormy old blanket and a lousy old bed;
The foreman he sleeps on fine linen sheets,
But he ain't got the guts to stand in my cleats.

I pay for my tools and I pay for my grub,
And wash off the lice in a cold iron tub;
The crooked old scaler he sure thinks I'm dumb,
But I know the old bastard has got a long thumb.

I hear that the union is coming to stay;
We'll clean up the camps and raise all our pay;
We'll build one big union all over the land,
And I know just where this top faller will stand.

Copyright ©1973, 2000 Bruce Phillips

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