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In the summer of 2012, as I was getting ready to hit the road to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse play at Red Rocks in Colorado as part of their Americana tour, I was also reading a memoir by Joan Didion in which she describes the arduous trek that her relatives made across the country to California during the Gold Rush. She describes what it took for them to make that trek in blunt terms: the ability to “break clean with everyone and everything they knew.” Didion quotes a passage from the diary of an emigrant named Bernard Reid, filled with descriptions of men, women, and children dying due to wagon accidents, cholera, starvation, infection, and a range of other ailments and mishaps. Their survivors had to bury them quickly; pausing to properly mourn friends and family just wasn’t an option. Sometimes the living couldn’t even wait for the dying to actually die. Reid writes about coming across an apparently abandoned wagon with a fresh grave next to it. As his party approached, Reid was surprised to see a teenaged girl sitting on the wagon’s step, “her feet resting on the grass and her eyes apparently directed at vacancy”:

She seemed like one dazed or in a dream and did not seem to notice me till I spoke with her. I then learned from her in reply to my questions that she was Miss Gilmore, whose parents had died two days before; that her brother, younger than herself, was sick in the wagon…that their oxen were lost or stolen by the Indians; and that the train they had been traveling with, after waiting for three days on account of the sickness and death of her parents, had gone on that morning, fearful, if they delayed longer, of being caught by winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains…Who could tell the deep sense of bereavement, distress, and desolation that weigh on that poor girl’s heart, there in the wilderness, with no telling what fate was in store for her and her sick brother?

In his diary, Reid doesn’t say what happened to Miss Gilmore. I took that to mean that nothing good happened. Reading about Miss Gilmore sitting at the edge of America’s golden dream, staring out into vacancy, I thought again about Clementine floating in the river, her ruby lips above the water, blowing bubbles soft and fine. (What had happened to her mother? Nothing good.)

Decent covers of “Clementine” are few and far between, and decent covers that slow it down and capture this kind of grief are even more so. These two young girls from Sweden, who perform the song with their father on zither, accordion and a pedal steel guitar, do a fine job of it:

Add a few thundering drums and jagged guitars from the Neil Young cover, close your eyes, and you can see the peaks of the Sierra Nevadas cutting the grief violently short.

Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Peak, Ansel Adams, 1944

“Every one of these songs has verses that have been ignored,” Young has said of Americana:

And those are the key verses, those are the things that make these songs live. They’re a little heavy for kindergarteners to be singing…in “Clementine” the verses are so dark. Almost every one has to do with people getting killed, with life-or-death struggles. You don’t hear much about that; they’ve been made into something much more light. So I moved them away from that gentler interpretation. With new melodies and arrangements, we could use the folk process to invoke the original meanings for this generation. (American Songwriter)

I for one thank him for doing so. (If you are more inclined to those gentler interpretations, though, among the best are the versions by Pete Seeger and Connie Francis, along with the version that accompanies the title sequence to John Ford’s classic film Oh My Darling Clementine from 1946.)

A Bully, A Zombie

By the time I was an adolescent “Clementine” had taken on another meaning, one that also had cruelty at its core and reflects the song’s origins. For the teenaged me, “Clementine” was about bullies. I had filled in some of the lyrics and figured out that the singer might not be a caring, grief-stricken father. Instead, he might be a boy. A mean boy. The kind of boy who takes a girl to the dance as a joke, on a bet or a dare, humiliates her in public, and then leaves her behind, taking off with the pretty cheerleader and his buddies.

I didn’t have to experience this kind of treatment myself to know how much damage it does. This story is also one that most American kids know well from contemporary folklore, TV sitcoms and the movies. (Stephen King’s Carrie comes to mind most graphically.)

Clementine’s big feet, her awkward stumble into the river, the inability (or unwillingness?) of the narrator to save her, his subsequent kiss with her little sister – it’s all there. In 1960, the California duo Jan and Dean picked up on this. In their version, Clementine is the miner’s “offspring” and the singer’s “chick” and her death is about as sad as a setting sun on a beach that is otherwise full of boards, beer, and babes in bikinis:

In his popular version that same year, Bobby Darin turned the song into swank swing, but in so doing turned Clementine into a bullied chubby girl. Instead of tripping and falling into the river, in this version she tries to cross it on a footbridge, but the bridge collapses under her weight. “I’m no swimmer,” croons Darin, “but were she slimmer, I mighta saved fat Clementine.” He concludes with a warning to all the fellas headed out to sea: don’t mistake Clementine’s bloated dead body for a whale.

This bullying is also rooted in the song’s origins. According to some sources, it was sung by rough riders in the goldminer camps (guys who could have tossed mean little Bobby Darin down a shaft) as an irreverent, bawdy take on the traditional sad ballad about a lost sweetheart. In versions of the song credited to Barker Bradford circa 1885, the miners don’t make fun of Clementine’s looks, but they do make it clear that she gave them a good time:

Her noble father was the foreman
Of every valued mine,
And ever miner and every ranchman
Was known to Clementine.

In some versions, the lyrics suggest Clementine was charging the miners fees for her favors, sometimes with the approval or even at the prodding of her poppa. (A few variants also seem to imply incest or allow for that reading, but I’m not going there. I’ll just note that it seems plausible, obviously makes the song that much meaner and darker, and move on.)

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