Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you, away you rolling river...
One of my favourite songs, an old river shanty, it could've been sung about an Indian Chief's daughter, or someone else's daughter, or the land, or something else entirely. Well, it was sung about all, and a lot of other stuff too. A river song, the Missouri River is a boundary between this world and another. Each voyage between the two means leaving something beloved behind in the other. A most beautiful folk song.
Tennessee Ernie Ford - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khxx3sCVhtE
Silhouettes against a ship's mast. Beautiful, sparse and sombre arrangement. Tennessee Ernie Ford, a man with the kind of moustache that could win poker games on a weak hand, could probably sell you a broken down Chevrolet without you thinking you'd been had. A voice you have to believe. Sat leaning on a bar table, singing as though running over the same sad memories that haunt him every time he drinks whisky.
Arlo Guthrie did it like this -
Emmylou Harris did it like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Veyl_s1Y-x4
A song that travels, and is sung by little angelic boys in the Cologne Cathedral Boys' Choir - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj1qUGKXKog
A song that would come to represent the displacement and longing of Civil War Bands - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3Pak0uwwA
Of course, Paul Robeson did this song in that way he had of really doing songs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gtJkeXAMt0
A song that haunts me always.
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