Oh My Darling, Clementine

The story

"Oh My Darling, Clementine" (Roud 9611, sometimes simply "Clementine") is a traditional American Western folk ballad, tragic but sometimes comic, in trochaic metre. It is usually credited to Percy Montrose (or Montross), 1884, and sometimes to Barker Bradford, 1885. Its many versions all centre on Clementine, the daughter of a "miner forty-niner" and the singer's sweetheart, who falls into a raging current one day while doing her chores and drowns, because her lover cannot swim. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the top 100 Western songs of all time.

Montrose's words were issued as sheet music by Oliver Ditson & Co of Boston in 1884, based on an earlier song, "Down by the River Liv'd a Maiden", printed in 1863. The origin of the melody is unknown. In his book South from Granada, Gerald Brenan claims that it came from an old Spanish ballad made popular by Mexican miners during the California Gold Rush, best known from the "Romance del Conde Olinos", a sad love story very popular in Spanish-speaking cultures.

It is not clear when, where and by whom the song was first recorded in English, but the first version to reach the Billboard charts was Bing Crosby's, recorded on 14 June 1941, which briefly reached No. 20: an up-tempo arrangement by Hal Hopper and John Scott Trotter with five swinging verses of new words, one of them mentioning Gene Autry. Jan and Dean's "Clementine", released on the Dore label in November 1959, reached No. 65 on the Billboard Hot 100. Bobby Darin's version of 1960, with words credited to Woody Harris, turned Clementine into a woman of 299 pounds who might be mistaken for a whale, and reached No. 12 in Canada. Tom Lehrer recorded a set of variations on the song in 1959, on An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, to show his theory that "folk songs are so atrocious because they were written by the people", singing its verses in the styles of Cole Porter, Mozart, bebop and Gilbert and Sullivan.

The tune travelled far. In 1961, when the ethnomusicologist Colin Turnbull asked a group of Ituri pygmies to sing the oldest song they knew, they sang to the tune of "Clementine". It carries the New Year song "Xīnnián Hǎo", sung at Chinese New Year, the Jewish New Year song "Dip the Apple in the Honey", "Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan" in the Hindi film C.I.D. (1956), the Indonesian children's song "Makan Apa" and a drinking song of Scandinavian student societies. In Cyprus, Christodoulos Papachrysostomou set to it "It Was the First of April", an EOKA song commemorating the start of the EOKA uprising against British colonial rule on 1 April 1955. Its melody was the theme of the North Korean film The Flower Girl (1972), whose music was claimed to be the work of Kim Il-sung, and in George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) the tune of "Beasts of England" is described as something between "La Cucaracha" and "Oh My Darling, Clementine".

It runs through John Ford's film My Darling Clementine (1946), with Henry Fonda, from its opening credits on, and townspeople sing it before a screening in Hud (1963); a garbled version was the signature tune of the cartoon dog Huckleberry Hound. In 1992 Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, sang "Darlin' Clementine" on The Late Late Show on Irish television only hours after the Teebane bombing had killed eight people, seven of them civilians; he was forced to resign shortly afterwards.

What it says

A mock-sad ballad. The singer remembers his sweetheart Clementine, the daughter of a gold miner, describes her with affectionate exaggeration, and tells how she slipped into the river while driving her ducklings to the water and drowned, since he could not swim to save her. The chorus mourns her as lost and gone for ever, and the last verses turn the grief into a joke. The mood is a lament played for laughs.

The words