Red River Valley

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“Red River Valley” is one of the best-loved folk songs in North America — and one of its great mysteries, because nobody knows for certain which Red River it’s about. Canadian folklorists make a strong case that the song is older and northern: it was known across five Canadian provinces before 1896 and may date to 1870 in Manitoba’s Red River Valley, where the original heartbroken singer was said to be a local Métis woman bidding farewell to a soldier heading back east. Its first published version appeared in 1896 under the title “In the Bright Mohawk Valley” — set in New York State! — and it has traveled under many other names, including “Bright Sherman Valley” and “Cowboy Love Song,” the title of its first recording by singing cowboy Carl Sprague in 1925.

But it was Gene Autry who made it a cowboy song forever. America’s Singing Cowboy sang it in the 1936 Republic Pictures Western named for the song, Red River Valley, and returned to it a decade later in Sioux City Sue — and that was that. Autry’s warm, unhurried delivery fixed the song in the popular imagination as a cowhand’s farewell along the Red River of the Texas–Oklahoma border, and Hollywood kept the association alive when the melody drifted through John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath in 1940. Nearly every great voice in American music has taken a turn with it since — Woody Guthrie, Marty Robbins, Pete Seeger, Connie Francis, George Strait, and Suzy Bogguss, who recorded it in 2011 precisely so a new generation would learn to sing along. It even spawned a Top 10 rock instrumental, “Red River Rock,” in 1959. Whichever valley it started in, it long ago became everyone’s valley — the Western Writers of America rank it among the ten greatest Western songs of all time.