Song for the day...
Red River Valley is a folk song and cowboy music standard of controversial origins that has gone by different names—e.g., "Cowboy Love Song", "Bright Sherman Valley", "Bright Laurel Valley", "In the Bright Mohawk Valley", and "Bright Little Valley"—depending on where it has been sung.
From this valley they say you are going.
We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile,
For they say you are taking the sunshine
That has brightened our pathway a while.
Edith Fowke offers anecdotal evidence that the song was known in at least five Canadian provinces before 1896.[1] 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 Texas 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 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
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