Oh Shenandoah

The story

"Oh Shenandoah" is an American folk song of unknown origin from the early 19th century, number 324 in the Roud Folk Song Index. It appears to have begun with American and Canadian voyageurs, the fur traders who travelled the Missouri River by canoe into Native American lands. Many of them lived among, and sometimes married into, the Native nations they traded with. Some versions heard before 1860 tell of a trader who wished to marry the daughter of Shenandoah (1710–1816), a chief of the Oneida Iroquois of Oneida Castle in central New York, who helped found the Oneida Academy that became Hamilton College and is buried there.

The voyageurs were known as singers, and in the early 19th century the flatboatmen of the Missouri sang it among their shanties. Boatmen carried it down the Mississippi, where sailors made it a capstan shanty, sung while hauling in the anchor, and from there it went aboard American clipper ships and around the world. By the mid-1800s it was a sea shanty of sailors in many ports. Captain Robert Chamblet Adams printed it as "Shanadore" in The New Dominion Monthly in April 1876 and in his book On Board the "Rocket" (1879); William L. Alden printed it in Harper's New Monthly Magazine in 1882. A Black Barbadian sailor was heard singing a version aboard the Glasgow ship Harland in 1894, and on St. Vincent in the Caribbean it became "World of Misery". In 1930 a former clipper-ship sailor wrote to The Times that he believed it had begun as an African American spiritual that turned into a work song.

Because it passed from river to sea by word of mouth, the song has no fixed words. Percy Grainger recorded the London singer Charles Rosher in 1906, and the former shantyman Stanley Slade of Bristol was recorded in 1943. Paul Robeson was one of the first popular singers to record it, from the 1930s on, followed by Pete Seeger, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and many others, and it was heard in films such as Shenandoah (1965) with Jimmy Stewart.

The name later came to be heard as Virginia's Shenandoah Valley and River. A 2006 proposal to make it Virginia's interim state song with new words was contested, since most versions refer to the Missouri River and to the chief rather than to Virginia. In 2015 the Virginia legislature designated "Our Great Virginia", set to its melody, as the official traditional state song.

What it says

A slow, longing song of parting: the singer is bound away across a wide river and calls out to a person and a place left behind. Older versions tell of a trader courting a chief's daughter; later sailors' versions keep only the farewell and the rolling of the river.

The words