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A Great Folk Song 2/19/2016 5:01:58 PM
Not too long ago, while I was listening to music as background to my work, I heard an announcer say that the next tune would be an old American folk song called "Shenandoah". I always had a special liking for this song, so I put my work aside for a few minutes to listen.
Up to now, I've believed that "Shenandoah" was about a settler in the west who sang about how much he missed the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia where he came from. As it turns out, this is a minority view of the song. Another interpretation has more currency. French Canadian voyageurs worked on the rivers of western North America. One of them, so the story goes, was a boatman on the Missouri River. He made friends with a native chief named Shenandoah and fell in love with his daughter, whose name is Sally in some versions of the song. The singer laments that his work on the Missouri has kept him from seeing Shenandoah and presumably Sally, too, for seven years.
The music with its rising and falling lilt suggests that the singer's longing and also the rolling Missouri River. I'm sure I'm not the only person for whom the tune is unforgettable, the sort of melody, I wager, that Franz Schubert would have liked. But with my new understanding, I also found the story magnetic.
First, the friendship between the singer and Shenandoah. "I long to hear you." They must have had extensive and rewarding conversations in a language they both understood. Shenandoah must have advised the young man, encouraged him, and made him feel decent about himself, even though he was a solitary man, away from his home and people he knew. Shenandoah must have lifted his confidence.
Second, seven years can be a long time and yet the boatman remembers Shenandoah and his beloved Sally. Time hasn't erased them from his thoughts. He's not thinking about folks he may have met the week before. He wants to see these particular people. Loyalty of that kind is part of the human story. For some, it's second nature. As Shakespeare said in his 116th sonnet, "Love does not alter when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove."
I listened to the song again a few days later. It still had a strong emotional impact, but this time I asked a different question. The singer didn't work every day or every week for seven years and the Missouri River isn't in Siberia. What prevented him from taking a few days off to visit his old friend and the woman he considered his sweetheart?
Supposing it wasn't a problem of distance or money, but a cultural, ethnic, racial divide of the kind that occurs everywhere in the world, not just the United States. He couldn't bring himself to tear down the wall between his people and Shenandoah's and ask if Sally would be his bride. Or maybe Shenandoah and Sally had told him that she needed to stay in the environment she knew. In either case, he suffers a terrific ache that he expresses in music that has evoked tears and touched countless hearts.
We may never learn what happened to the young man in the song. Does he go back to Sally and Shenandoah? Does he carry grief in his heart for the rest of his life? He doesn't sound like the sort of person who would listen to admonitions to get a life. Maybe he passes through long stretches of thoughtful silence, after which he sings his unforgettable and beautiful song and teaches it to people who believe he's wasting his life.
