Red River Valley

The story

"Red River Valley" is a folk song and cowboy standard of uncertain origin, sung under many names, among them "Cowboy Love Song", "Bright Sherman Valley", "In the Bright Mohawk Valley" and "Bright Little Valley", depending on where it was sung. Its first known appearance in print was in the Milwaukee paper The Weekly Wisconsin in 1887: on 25 June the paper listed it among songs whose words readers had asked for, and on 17 September it printed a version sent in by a reader from Mondovi, in western Wisconsin. The earliest known manuscript of the words, titled "The Red River Valley", bears the notes "Nemaha 1879" and "Harlan 1885", names of counties in Nebraska and of towns in Iowa.

The Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke found anecdotal evidence that the song was known in at least five Canadian provinces before 1896, which led to the idea that it was made at the time of the Wolseley Expedition of 1870 to the Red River Valley of Manitoba, as the lament of a local woman, perhaps a Métis, whose soldier lover was about to return east. That evidence is sparse and doubtful, and the link to the expedition is almost entirely unsupported. The valley runs south into the United States, where the river forms the border between Minnesota and North Dakota, and where exactly the song began is unresolved; but the weight of the evidence shows that it is this northern Red River the song means, not a southern or western river of the same name.

The song was printed as sheet music in New York in 1896, as "In the Bright Mohawk Valley" by James J. Kerrigan, and Carl Sandburg included words and tune in his American Songbag of 1927. The same year Hugh Cross and Riley Puckett recorded it for Columbia under the title "Red River Valley", the first commercial recording under its best-known name and the model for many that followed. Gene Autry sang it in the 1936 film Red River Valley, and in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), a story of displaced Oklahomans, it became linked with the southern Red River. Members of the Western Writers of America ranked it tenth among the Top 100 Western songs of all time.

Its tune has carried many other words. "Jarama Valley", a song about the Battle of Jarama in the Spanish Civil War, used its tune and was recorded by Woody Guthrie and the Almanac Singers with Pete Seeger. Johnny and the Hurricanes turned it into the rock and roll hit "Red River Rock" in 1959, Willie Nelson set new words to it as "Can I Sleep in Your Arms" in 1975, and Helena Vondráčková made her recording debut with a Czech version, "Červená řeka", in 1964. It is the official slow march of the Fort Garry Horse, a reserve cavalry regiment of the Canadian Army, and Liverpool supporters sing the chant "Scouser Tommy" to it.

What it says

A song of parting: the singer begs a loved one who is leaving the valley to stay a while, or at least to remember the valley and the one left behind who loved them truly. The mood is tender and sorrowful.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.