Oh Shenandoah, I love your daughter....

It is good to remember the longing refrains of "Shenandoah, I love your daughter."

Listen below to the traditionalist Tennessee Ernie Ford version of this song I recently sang in a New Bern concert.

One of America's greatest ballads. It is many a man's voyage: a song of leaving, roving, but always loving...with the heart forever open to the dream of peace, a return home.

The trapper and the Indian maiden, the "archetypical" image of the American frontier.....where love and movement sometimes uneasily coexist. Centuries of romance have swirled around "Shenandoah's Daughter:"

'Tis seven years,

I've been a rover,

Away you rolling river,

When I return,

I'll be your lover,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

It was once informally the state song of Virginia, before that a boatsman's song on the Missouri River, then a shanty song shipping around the world with the clipper ship crews out of New Orleans.

Listen to Paul Robeson's 1936 version. The great Afro American singer was a classmate of my father at Columbia Law School, class of 1923. This son of a slave, obsessed with the battle against lynching, threw in his lot as an apologist for the Soviet Union. He lost his show business career in the "Red Scare" of the early 1950's.

Few are the Americans who have not sung or heard this tale of the American voyage. Check out a vast panorama based in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley as painted out on the melody of this great ballad. And click below to listen to a golden white robed choir of youth following with Bruce Springsteen's glistening arrangement.





Now it is truly international. Hear the words of the equisite Norwegian singer Sissel. Compare with New Zealand's teenage superstar Hayley Westenra (the version on my cellphone ringback.) Hear a violin version by Celtic Woman. Then there's Arlo Guthrie. Top it off with Anna Sophia-Henry, a nine year old soprano.

Lastly, listen to actor Jimmy Stewart's Hollywood version of "Shenandoah" -- tailored to a post Civil War call for peace and healing.

And here is a standard version of the grand old ballad:

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to hear you,

Away you rolling river,

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to hear you,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

Oh Shenandoah,

I love your daughter,

Away you rolling river,

I'll take her 'cross

Your rollin' water,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

'Tis seven years,

I've been a rover,

Away you rolling river,

When I return,

I'll be your lover,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

Oh Shenandoah,

I'm bound to leave you.

Away you rolling river,

Oh Shenandoah,

I'll not deceive you.

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

The origin of the name Shenandoah is much debated. One theory holds that Shenandoah is an Indian word meaning "sprucy stream" or "river flowing alongside high hills and mountains."

Acccording to Wikipedia, that great source of modern wisdom. the word Shenandoah does come from Algonquian-Wakashian American Indians and mean Beautiful star daughter; maybe spruce-lined stream or vast prairie.

Another theory is the origin of the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, Indian, of course, and also means "daughter of the skies."

Other claims are that Shenandoah is Iroquois for "great plains" and less likely, that it is derived from the Schind-han-dom or "spruce stream."

Whatever the source, the ballad lives on -- and its sounds ever change along the rivers of life.

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Ah, sweet Indian maid, where has thee been before? In "Song of the Indian Maid," by John Keats, 1818:

Young Stranger!
I've been a ranger
In search of pleasure throughout every clime;
Alas! 'tis not for me!
Bewitch'd I sure must be,
To lose in grieving all my maiden prime.
Come then, Sorrow,
Sweetest Sorrow!
Like an own babe I nurse thee on my breast:
I thought to leave thee,
And deceive thee,
But now of all the world I love thee best.

Let us come down from the highbrow lyricism of English poetry and explore the dozens of love songs about Indian maidens published in the "Tin Pan Alley" parlor music of a century ago (Click on the link to enjoy both the lyrics and the sounds).

Centuries of romance have swirled around "Shenandoah's Daughter."