You can hear this recording at the Internet Archive:


BALLAD OF OLE SVENSON
(Harry Stewart)
As recorded by "Yogi Yorgesson" (Harry Stewart) with Johnny Duffy and The Scandahoovians, Capitol (3089), 1955.

SPOKEN: You've heard "The Ballad of Davy Crockett", and you know of Paul Bunyan's fame,
But let me tell you about the greatest hero of them all. Ole Svenson was his name.

CHORUS: Ole, Ole Svenson,
King of the Great North Woods!

Born in Minnesota many years ago,
Way up there where the tall Swedes grow,
Fingers like bananas and a neck like a tree,
He was tending bar at the age of three. CHORUS

When he was a boy, it has been said,
He made a yo-yo from a hunk of lead.
Ole never shot any buffalo.
He just knocked them silly with his lead yo-yo. CHORUS

Ole chewed tobacco, four plugs at once.
Sixty pounds would last about two months.
He could break the horns off a big bull moose
When he let fly a squirt of tobacco juice. CHORUS

Ole had a sweetheart, ja, indeed,
Half Sioux Indian, the other half Swede.
The Swedes all loved her; the Sioux did too.
Ole called her his big Swede Sioux. CHORUS

Ole's girl fought in the Indian war.
She rode with the cavalry a year or more.
Captured many times by an Indian pack,
She was scalped three times but her hair grew back. CHORUS

At ninety, Ole left his stamping ground.
He walked from Fargo to Puget Sound.
They gave him a boat, his last request,
And he followed the herring right into the West.

LAST CHORUS: Ole, Ole Svenson,
He followed the herring right into the West.