Oh, My Darling Clementine: A Song History

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The words of "Clementine" reached print two decades before its familiar melody: in 1863 they appeared as "Down by the River Lived a Maiden," credited to H. S. Thompson, set to a different tune (marked as a mazurka, according to Jon W. Finson) and written in minstrel dialect.[1] A text printed the following year in Billy Morris' Songs turned Clementine into something close to a creature of legend.[1] The melody now known everywhere arrived in 1884, when Oliver Ditson of Boston issued "Oh, My Darling Clementine," a song with chorus credited to Percy Montrose.[1][2] A year later the New York publisher Willis Woodward brought out a "Clementine" under the name of Barker Bradford.[3] Sources differ on who should be credited: the Traditional Ballad Index notes that nothing else is known of Montrose, that the Bradford attribution rests on a text unlike the usual one, and that the question probably cannot be resolved.[1]

Faded daguerreotype of four bearded miners seated at a table outside a rough cabin

[Four Gold Miners Seated in Front of Their House], daguerreotype, ca. 1852. Gold miners of the 1850s, shown for the era of the song's first printings; they have no connection to the song.

The Ballad Index concludes that singers copied the Montrose version and learned it from print; the 1887 collection College Songs carries the same version that the index's editor grew up singing.[1] Other songs borrow its tune, among them "Found a Peanut."[1] Bradley Kincaid recorded it as "Darlin' Clementine" for Decca in 1934, and Pete Seeger also recorded it.[1] Judy House sets it twice, once with a capo at the third fret, in Favorite Sing-Along Songs For The Mountain Dulcimer, a collection of familiar sing-along songs whose arrangements, its listing says, aim between too simple and too hard.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Oh, My Darling Clementine"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Clementine".
  2. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Oh, my darling Clementine: song and chorus".
  3. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Clementine: song and chorus".
  4. Judy House: "Favorite Sing-Along Songs For The Mountain Dulcimer".
  5. Image: [Four Gold Miners Seated in Front of Their House], daguerreotype, ca. 1852. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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