Red River Valley: A Song History

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"Red River Valley" is a parting song whose origins are disputed; the Roud Folk Song Index files it as number 756.[1] For many years the standard account, which the Traditional Ballad Index traces to the Lomaxes, derived it from "In the Bright Mohawk Valley," an 1896 sheet-music song credited to James J. Kerrigan.[1][2][3] In the United States it was taken to be a Texas reworking of that song, sung of the Red River along the Texas–Oklahoma line.[2][3] The Canadian folklorist Edith Fowke argued instead that it had circulated in about five Canadian provinces before 1896 and probably dated from the Red River Rebellion of 1870 in Manitoba. In the older texts the singer is a young Indigenous woman (Métis, in the Manitoba History account) whose soldier sweetheart, sent west, is now leaving her.[2][3]

George Inness painting of a broad river valley under a stormy sky, with a wagon on a road in the foreground

George Inness, The Delaware Valley, oil on canvas, about 1863. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). A river valley; it has no connection to the song.

Sources differ on which claim is right, and newer finds complicate both. The Ballad Index reports a three-verse parting song printed in a New Orleans paper in 1879 that names an unspecified valley rather than any river, a Red River text in an 1886 stage burlesque about the Riel Rebellion, an 1887 "Bright Little Valley" text with a cowboy line, and an 1874 songster piece that the index's editor thinks is probably the source of the words, though not of the tune.[1] The editor's tentative reading is that a generic valley song came first, that it was localized to the northern Red River by the mid-1880s, and that the Texas versions came later, while a 2013 article in Manitoba History argues for a Métis song of the northern valley.[1][2] None of the three histories cited here treats the 1896 Kerrigan song as the original.[1][2][3]

On record, the Texas singer Carl T. Sprague cut it as "Cowboy Love Song" for Victor in Camden, New Jersey, on 5 August 1925, one of a cluster of mid-1920s recordings that also includes several "Bright Sherman Valley" variants.[4][2][1] Hugh Cross and Riley Puckett recorded it as "Red River Valley" in Atlanta on 3 November 1927 for Columbia, apparently the first disc to carry that title, though Carl Sandburg had printed it under that name earlier the same year.[5][1] John Ford's film of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) uses it among its traditional songs, including a scene in which Henry Fonda dances with his screen mother to it.[6][7] Fiddlers mostly treat it as a two-step, sometimes as a breakdown for dancing, and it appeared in Henry Ford's 1926 collection Good Morning.[7]

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Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Red River Valley, The".
  2. Manitoba Historical Society: "The True Story of the Song 'Red River Valley'".
  3. The Canadian Encyclopedia: "The Red River Valley".
  4. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Victor matrix BVE-33145. Cowboy love song / Carl T. Sprague".
  5. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Columbia matrix W145091. Red River Valley / Hugh Cross ; Riley Puckett".
  6. AFI Catalog of Feature Films: "The Grapes of Wrath (1940)".
  7. Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Red River Valley".