Rivers of Texas

This was one of my standards in the late 1980s, because I loved the sound of a room full of people singing the chorus. I learned it from volume two of the Everybody Sing! LPs I had when I was a little kid,  where it was sung by Ellen Steckert and Milt Okun, and for a long time I forgot about it because after I  got into Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and blues I tended to dismiss the songs on those albums as pseudo-folk juvenalia. I don’t remember when or why I revised my opinion — maybe I heard someone like Ian Tyson sing it — but anyway it became one of my favorites, especially when Peter Keane was around to sing harmony.

Steckert learned this song from Sam Hinton, who has cropped up before in these chronicles, and he presumably learned it from Vance Randolph’s monumental collection Ozark Folksongs. Randolph recorded it in 1942 from a woman named Irene Carlisle in Fayetteville, Arkansas, who had grown up in the area and was herself a folklorist with several academic articles and an MA degree on her resume.

Sandy Paton writes on the Mudcat folksong website that he thought this sounded like a composed song rather than something from the oral tradition and asked Randolph, and Randolph said he’d had similar suspicions and asked Carlisle if she’d written it herself. She said no: “I learned it in 1921 from a hired man. He’d come up from Texas, cutting timber here in the Ozarks, and was boarding at our place. We courted a little, and he taught me that song. Then he went back to Texas.” Whether the hired man had composed it or learned it from someone else, he must have been close to the source, since no other version has ever been collected.

Another poster on that Mudcat thread cleared up a long-running geographical conundrum: the list of rivers in Randolph’s lyric includes the Natchez, which isn’t a river and isn’t in Texas, and Hinton, who was a Texan (born in Oklahoma, but raised in Crockett, TX), adapted that to Nacogdoches, which is in Texas but still isn’t a river (and doesn’t scan with the melody). However, the Mudcatter points out that there is a Neches River which flows through more than 400 miles of Texas. So the hired hand presumably sang “Neches” and Carlisle, being more familiar with Mississippi towns than Texas rivers, misheard it as “Natchez” — which doesn’t explain why Hinton, who grew up 30 miles from the Neches and would have had to cross it to reach Nacogdoches, didn’t make the correction.

Anyway, it’s a pretty song and I just wish Peter was around to sing harmony.