When Lee Murdock recorded an album of Great Lakes songs a decade ago, the Chicago-area folk singer had no plans to make a career of maritime music. “Cold Winds” was to have been his first nautical theme album–and also his last, Murdock recalled.
“At the time, there was no way I wanted to categorize or compartmentalize myself musically,” said Murdock, a singer-songwriter and guitarist who launched his career in the mid-1970s and released four albums of varied folk fare in the 1980s. “But after I put out that first Great Lakes album, my interest gravitated to the history and songs of the region, and over the years it has become my life’s work.
“It just kind of happened,” said Murdock. “But it feels right. This is what I should be doing.”
Murdock, who performs Saturday at the Maple Street Chapel in Lombard, recently released his sixth CD of songs about life on the Great Lakes. “The Lost Lake Sailors” (Depot Recordings) includes original and traditional chanties and ballads about watery graves and sunken ships, but the overall theme transcends the obvious shipwreck analogy, according to Murdock.
“The songs deal with loss at sea, but there is also a sense of people lost in other ways, and I think there is a universality to that theme,” he said.
“There are sailors who get lost in their career; there are guys on freighters who have spent 20 years at sea and missed out on things like births and graduations and Christmas with their family,” Murdock said. “Other sailors are lost in spirit or just missing from the pages of history, like the African-American sailors who worked on Great Lakes ships in the late 1800s. `The Lost Lake Sailors’ sounds like a sad title for a CD, but it really encompasses a broad range of human endeavor and emotions.”
Murdock dedicated the CD to the late Ivan Walton, a Michigan folklorist who began collecting maritime songs in the 1920s, and Art Thieme, a traditional folk singer from the Chicago area whose career has been curtailed in recent years by multiple sclerosis. Murdock has recorded a number of songs collected by Walton and learned the traditional ballad “The Shanty Boy on the Big Eau Claire,” one of the songs on “Lost Lake Sailors,” after hearing Thieme perform it at a folk festival years ago.
“I found a lot of inspiration in Art’s musical integrity and his love of Midwestern folk songs,” Murdock said. “As you go along the path, you start to understand the inspiration that other people have given you, and it’s important to acknowledge that.”
As a child, Murdock recalled, he loved the songs of Burl Ives and the vocal styles of Perry Como and Billie Holiday. He also lists Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, John Prine and Leonard Cohen among his musical influences.
A self-taught musician, he began playing acoustic guitar at age 12, switched to electric guitar as a teenager and took up acoustic guitar again during college in the early 1970s.
After receiving a degree in geology from Drake University, Murdock returned to the Chicago area to try his luck as a folk singer and eventually settled in Kaneville. He currently performs more than 200 shows annually and gives guitar lessons once a week to intermediate and advanced students at Tobias Music in Downers Grove.
“When I first started giving guitar lessons, back in 1984, I did it to supplement my income from performing,” Murdock said. “Now I teach because it really deepens my understanding of the instrument. When you have a student asking you how you do something, you have to figure out how to explain it and articulate it both theoretically and practically.”
Lee Murdock
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday.
Where: Maple Street Chapel, Main and Maple Streets in Lombard.
Admission: $10; call 630-964-4871. A portion of the proceeds will benefit the chapel’s restoration fund.
