Listen: "Little Brown Bulls" as sung by Robert Walker, Crandon, Wisconsin, 1941.

This folk ballad describes a contest in a northwoods Wisconsin logging camp between a pair of “big spotted steers” and two “little brown bulls” to determine which team could haul or “skid” the most timber in a single day. The Wisconsin Folksong Collection includes a dozen recordings of this song as sung by former lumberjacks; each singer places the event in a different location. In Walker’s version, the contest takes place in a logging camp on the Wolf River.

via: Wisconsin Folksong Collection 1937-1946, Mills Music Library by way of University of Wisconsin Digital Collections