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Come and sit by my side if you love me

By S.K. Bardwell
Posted Monday, March 30, 2009

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The news is driving me batty lately. Battier. It’s not the economy, or the war, or the jobless rate, or the Dow.

It’s the Red River.

The Red River has been much in the news this past week, as it approaches 41 feet and people in Fargo, North Dakota and elsewhere along its path frantically attempt to ward off the expected flooding.

Every time I turn on the news or read a newspaper online, I’m confronted with headlines about the Red River.

For days now, I’ve been singing “Red River Valley” in my head. And there’s more snow, which will melt and run into the river. I don’t see any end to the Red River headlines, or the song in my head.

So I thought, since I’m going crazy, I’d take my readers with me, by writing about the Red River. I’ll have you back before you know it – it’s a short trip.

When I sing “Red River Valley,” I’m thinking of the Red River that forms part of the Texas-Oklahoma border. The Red River I cross when I go home to Tulsa. The Red River that is a tributary of the Missippi River.

An aside: That trip to Tulsa is a funny one. When I drive there, I say I’m going home to visit. When I drive back, I say I’m going home. It strikes me that I’m lucky to have two homes when some people don’t have any. I wonder what rich people with many homes say when they go from one to another.

Back to the Red River: The one being fought in North Dakota starts in the U.S. and is the border between Minnesota and North Dakota, before it flows northward (really) into Manitoba, Canada and empties into Lake Winnipeg.

But, although the Red River in the headlines is not the one I think of when I sing the song (over and over and over), it is very probably the one about which the song was written.

I say very probably because no one seems to know for sure who wrote “Red River Valley,” about which river, at what time.

There’s evidence the song was known in Canadian provinces before it ever made its way to the U.S. The earliest written manuscript titled “Red River Valley” bears two dates – 1879 and 1885, and locations in western Iowa. Sheet music for the song was printed in 1896, but with the title "In the Bright Mohawk Valley."

In 1925, Carl T. Sprague, a Texan, recorded it as "Cowboy Love Song." In 1926, Kelly Harrell recorded it as "Bright Sherman Valley." The first really popular version was by Texan Jules Verne Allen in 1929, as “Cowboy Love Song.”

But in 1940, Henry Fonda sang the song in John Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” which of course is about a poor family’s flight from the Oklahoma dustbowl in the thirties. That pretty much clinched the song’s association with the southern Red River, right or wrong.

Moving beyond the Red River, other headlines have been just as tough on me lately. National Public Radio did a story on the Mexican drug cartel violence threatening to spill across the border into Brownsville, McAllen, Laredo and El Paso.

I was horribly conflicted.

Go with Marty Robbins? “The west Texas city of El Paso/Where long ago I heard a song/About a Texas cowboy and a girl/And a little place called Rosa's/Where he used to go and watch this beauty whirl.”

Or should I walk out in “The Streets of Laredo”? Where I might see “a young cowboy all wrapped in white linen/wrapped in white linen as cold as the clay”?

I went with “Laredo,” because I know more of the words to that one. I don’t know any songs about McAllen or Brownsville. Thank heavens.

A freakish late-March blizzard hit Kansas City in the past week and after watching the headlines, I was goin’: “I might take a train/I might take a plane/But if I have to walk/I’m goin’ just the same.”

Afghanistan is in the news a lot. I don’t know any songs about Afghanistan. But I do a rather coarse Rudyard Kipling poem about that country, and I repeat it in my head some mornings after watching the news.

Some of the connections my brain makes are simple. In the aftermath of Katrina, I had Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” in my head for weeks. I wasn’t taking it lightly. I honestly can’t help it.

Other connections I make subconsciously are much more nebulous: One morning one of the TV heads talked at length about bear markets, and I actually got the “Daniel Boone” theme song in my head (“Daniel Boone was a man/yes a bi-i-i-g man”). There’s nothing about a bear in the song, but there are many tall tales about Boone and bears.

Maybe in times past I would have been a strolling minstrel, giving people news in ballad form. Maybe I’d have been stoned to death for singing inappropriate tunes at inappropriate times.

I see trouble looming on my horizon, in the shape of the fight building between North Korea, which plans to launch a suspect “satellite” early in April, and says it will consider any shots taken at said satellite as an act of war, and Japan, over whose territory the satellite will be launched and which has promised to shoot down anything that flies over its territory.

I don’t know any songs that even vaguely apply to that situation or those places. And yet I know my brain-music will not be silenced simply by the absence of news-places that are not song titles.

That day’s news may find me hugging my knees, rocking back and forth and singing, “Maresy doats and doesy doats …”

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