Oh My Darling, Clementine
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Oh My Darling, Clementine is an American western folk ballad usually credited to Percy Montrose (1884), though sometimes to Barker Bradford. The song is believed to have been based on another called Down by the River Liv'd a Maiden by H. S. Thompson (1863).
The words are those of a bereaved lover singing about his darling, the daughter of a "49er", (a miner in the 1849 California Gold Rush). He loses her in a drowning accident – though he consoles himself towards the end of the song with Clementine's "little sister".
Oh My Darling, Clementine has become popular, especially with Scouts and other groups of young people, as a campfire and excursion song, and there are several different versions of the words. (There is even a Scottish version, the Climbing Clementine, which begins "In a crevice, high on Nevis...")
The verse about the little sister was often left out of folk song books intended for children, presumably because it seemed morally questionable.
In his book South from Granada, Gerald Brenan attributes the melody to originally being an old Spanish ballad, which was made popular by Mexican miners during the Gold Rush, and given various English texts. No particular source is cited to verify that the song he used to hear in the 1920s in a remote Spanish village was not an old text with new music, but Brenan states in his preface that all facts mentioned in the book have been checked reasonably well.
The song was featured in the film My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda, the 1963 Paul Newman film HUD, and in the television series M*A*S*H. Bobby Darin had a top ten success in the UK with this song. It was also the favorite song of Hanna-Barbera character Huckleberry Hound, who sang it in his cartoons. The song was one of two bases, the other being La Cucaracha, of a protest anthem sung by the animals of Animal Farm when they were fighting Mr. Jones. And the song's tune was used for a new song teaching the seven days of the week on Barney and Friends. Furthermore, the title of the song was the nominal inspiration for the Sesame Street Muppet Clementine, the girlfriend of Forgetful Jones. In fact, one muppet sketch started out with him singing the song to himself until Clementine suddenly appeared. "There you are," replied Forgetful, "I thought you were gone!"
