Oh My Darling Clementine

Oh My Darling Clementine By Connie Francis and Jonny Hills Oh My Darling, Clementine is an American western folk ballad usually credited to Percy Montrose (1884), even though it's sometimes referred to Barker Bradford. The song is believed to have been based on another song 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 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". The verse about the little sister was often left out of folk song books intended for children, presumably because it seemed morally questionable. Gerald Brenan attributes the melody to originally being an old Spanish ballad in his book South from Granada. It was made popular by Mexican miners during the Gold Rush. It was also 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. Forty-niners The first people to rush to the gold fields, beginning in the spring of 1848, were the residents of California themselves—primarily agriculturally oriented Americans and Europeans living in Northern California, along with Native Americans and some Californios (Spanish-speaking Californians).[30] These first miners tended to be families in which everyone helped in the effort. Women and children of all races were often found panning next to the men. Some enterprising families set up boarding houses to accommodate the influx of men; in such cases, the women often brought in steady income while their husbands searched for gold.