Across the Wide Missouri

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The Wide Missouri
Traditional

Nobody knows exactly who first sang this song, but it seems to have started early in the 1800s along the Missouri River. Fur traders traveled the river by canoe, trading with Native peoples, and they were well known as great singers. The oldest versions tell a simple, bittersweet story. A trader falls in love with the daughter of a chief named Shenandoah, and the chief wants nothing to do with him. Some trace that chief to Skenandoa, an Oneida leader in central New York who lived from 1710 to 1816. He helped found the school that became Hamilton College, and he is buried on its grounds.

That surprises a lot of people, because the song isn’t about Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley at all. In 2006, a proposal to make it Virginia’s interim state song stirred up a real argument, since the song sings about the Missouri River and a chief rather than anything in Virginia. Virginia found its own solution in 2015, when it adopted “Our Great Virginia,” set to this same beloved melody, as its official traditional state song.

From the rivers, the song went to sea. Boatmen sang it on the Missouri, and sailors heading down the Mississippi picked it up and turned it into a capstan shanty. They sang it as they walked the capstan round to haul up the anchor. The clipper ships carried it all over the world. By the mid-1800s, sailors everywhere knew it, each crew singing it a little differently. It first appeared in print in 1876, under the name “Shanadore.” In 1930, an old sailor wrote to The Times of London about his days in the wool trade in the 1880s. He said that aboard the famous clipper Cutty Sark, the crew sang it every day while packing bales of wool into the hold.

Sailors being sailors, some of their verses weren’t fit for polite company. When the collector Cecil Sharp took the song down from an old seaman in 1914, he quietly left one verse out of his book.

Paul Robeson was among the first popular singers to record it, starting in the 1930s. The Kingston Trio recorded it in Hollywood in the spring of 1959 under the title “Across the Wide Missouri.” It appeared on their album Here We Go Again!, released that October. Their producer had the three of them record their unison vocals twice and layered the takes together, which gave their harmonies that full, ringing sound. The song was never released as a single, but the album spent eight weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard chart and earned a gold record. For five weeks that fall, the Trio had four albums in the Top 10 at the same time.

There’s a curious wrinkle in the Trio’s record. Their track is credited to Ervin Drake and Jimmy Shirl, who wrote an entirely different song called “Across the Wide Missouri” in 1951, inspired by the Clark Gable film of the same name. Drake went on to write “It Was a Very Good Year.” Yet what the Trio actually sings is the old river song, with its familiar “away, you rolling river.”

The melody has stayed with us ever since. You can hear it in the 1965 Jimmy Stewart film Shenandoah, and members of the Western Writers of America named it one of the top 100 Western songs of all time.