Origins
Edith Fowke offers anecdotal evidence that the song was known in at least five Canadian provinces before 1896. This finding led to speculation that the song was composed at the time of the Wolseley Expedition to the northern Red River Valley of 1870 in Manitoba. It expresses the sorrow of a local man or woman (possibly a Métis, meaning of French and aboriginal origin) as her soldier/lover prepares to return to Ontario or as his girlfriend or wife can't take the harsh life in the west and leaves him to return to Canada.
The earliest written manuscript of the lyrics, titled "Red River Valley", bears the notations 1879 and 1885 in locations Nemha and Harlan in western Iowa, so it probably dates to at least that era.
The song appears in sheet music, titled "In the Bright Mohawk Valley", printed in New York in 1896 with James J. Kerrigan as the writer.
In 1925, Carl T. Sprague, an early singing cowboy from Texas, recorded it as "Cowboy Love Song" (Victor 20067, August 5, 1925), but it was fellow Texan Jules Verne Allen's 1929 "Cowboy's Love Song" (Victor 40167, March 28, 1929), that gave the song its greatest popularity. Allen himself thought the song was from Pennsylvania, perhaps brought over from Europe.
Read more about this topic: Red River Valley (song)
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