The Wide Mizzoura
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-11-28

Day 255 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

"Oh Shenandoah" is a traditional American folk song of uncertain origin, dating to the early 19th century. The song appears to have originated with Canadian and US fur traders traveling down the Missouri River in canoes, and has developed several different sets of lyrics. Some lyrics refer to the Oneida chief Shannadore and a canoe-going trader who wants to marry his daughter. By the mid 1800s versions of the song had become a sea shanty heard or sung by sailors in various parts of the world.

David Bone, in Capstan Bars reports, "I have never heard this song sung at other duty than weighing anchor.... The very beauty of the air has even curbed the license of wild singers in the text. No bawdy lines, no plaint of mistreatment, no blasphemous exhortations were ranted in the singing of it."

Sandburg writes: "Regular army men were singing this in 1897. Many years earlier sailormen were singing it their way. . . . Shannadore, I am told, may have been the name of a ship. Or it may be the old time pronunciation of the name of an Indian chief or the historic Virginia valley. When I asked Joseph B. Fifer, former governor of Illinois about his early life, he said, "I was born in the Shannadore Valley.” That was in the early 1840’s."