Red River Valley
"Red River Valley" is a farewell song to someone leaving the valley, and one of the best-known western songs. Where it started (Canada or the United States) is still argued about.
- Origin
- North America, by the 1870s–1880s
- Earliest written copy
- Manuscript dated "Nemaha 1879" and "Harlan 1885" (Nebraska and Iowa)
- First printed lyrics
- 17 Sep 1887, The Weekly Wisconsin, Milwaukee
- First recording
- 1927, Hugh Cross and Riley Puckett (Columbia 15206-D)
- Roud number
- 756
- Copyright
- Traditional, public domain
Traditional lyrics
From this valley they say you are going,
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway a while.
Chorus:
Come and sit by my side if you love me,
Do not hasten to bid me adieu,
But remember the Red River Valley
And the one who has loved you so true.
Many singers change the last line of the chorus to "And the cowboy who loved you so true."
Which Red River?
Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke found stories that the song was known in at least five Canadian provinces before 1896, and some tie it to the 1870 Wolseley Expedition to the Red River in Manitoba. That link is weak: the evidence is sparse and the expedition connection almost entirely unsupported. The oldest written copy comes from Nebraska and Iowa (1879 and 1885), and readers of a Milwaukee newspaper were asking for the song in June 1887.
In 1896 a New York sheet music edition titled "In the Bright Mohawk Valley" credited James J. Kerrigan, but the song was already in circulation by then.
On record and screen
Hugh Cross and Riley Puckett made the first commercial recording under the name "Red River Valley" in 1927, and a flood of recordings followed. It is heard in John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and the Western Writers of America ranked it number 10 among the top 100 western songs.
Chords in G
| G | G | G | D7 | | D7 | D7 | D7 | G | | G | G7 | C | C | | G | D7 | G | G |
Same progression for verse and chorus. It's a good first song on guitar, ukulele or autoharp.
More songs: Down in the Valley · all folk songs