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Yet other sources trace “Clementine” to another song titled “Down By the River Liv’d a Maiden,” written by Henry S. Thompson circa 1863, almost certainly for a minstrel show (the language and bawdy descriptions of Clementine’s physical features, including her pubic hair, border on the explicitly racist). In this version, the singer plies Clementine – his lover? a prostitute? it’s hard to tell – with wine. Drunk, walking in a storm along the river, she slips and drowns. The warning to the fellas here is tongue-in-cheek: don’t get the girl so drunk that she ends up dead:

Now all young men by me take warning,
Don’t gib your ladies too much rye wine,
Kase like as not is this wet wedder,
Dey’ll share de fate ob Clementine.

These verses about a drunk and promiscuous (or prostituted) Clementine are, of course, always scrubbed from children’s versions. So, too, are the verses in which the drowned Clementine rises out of the river to haunt the singer – wearing rotting clothes, stinking of death, and trying to “kiss” him one last time. Young includes these lines in his version:

In my dreams she still does haunt me,
Robed in garments soaked in brine.
Though in life I used to hug her,
In death I draw the line.

In Thompson’s version the lines are a tad more graphic and the “hug” is consummated:

In my dreams she still doth haunt me,
Robed in garments soaked with brine,
Then she rises from the waters,
And I kiss my Clementine.

Now ebry night down by the riber,
Her ghostess walks long half past nine
I know tis her a kase I hugged her,
And by de smell tis Clementine.

A Zombie Survivor

The Walking Dead‘s Clementine

I have a list of musicians I’d like to see follow in the steps of Neil Young and move “Clementine” even further away from its gentler interpretations, breathe even more fire into its cruel heart. At the same time, I feel deeply for Clementine, and those gentler versions sometimes call. I can think of several artists who would do it great justice in this regard too.

As a young girl listening to the song, I wanted very badly for “Clementine” to have a mother – the non-knife-throwing kind – and I still want that for her sometimes. This gentle version of “Clementine,” sung by the aptly named Sweptaways (also oddly enough from Sweden), is beautiful with its harmonic cascade of adult female voices. I like to imagine these singers as the once lost but now found mothers of all the drowned Clementines.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who feels for Clementine. In 2012, the same year that Americana was released, the creators of the video game The Walking Dead – which is based on the comic book series of the same name and chronicles the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse – introduced players to a new character: an 8-year-old girl named Clementine. Alone and forced to join a group of zombie survivors, she develops a strong relationship with a fellow survivor named Lee Everett, a convicted murderer and fugitive. He becomes her guardian and companion. They make an odd, somewhat disturbing pair (surrounded by zombies to boot). Not surprisingly bad things ensue for Clementine.

For many game players, Clementine quickly became an emotional lightning rod, “eliciting super-protective instincts” and “securing a place in their hearts,” as some reviewers put it. Clementine is now “the heart-breaking bedrock of the game,” writes another. During the character’s initial release, players generated a flood of memes that reflected how much Clementine meant to them, and tweeted their virtual concern and love for her using the hashtag #forclementine. They also created video homages set to the tune of “Clementine,” sometimes rewriting the lyrics almost entirely to reflect Clementine’s fate, and victory, as a 21st-century zombie survivor.

Within the folk process, at least, our darling Clementine is alive and well.

— Shaleane Gee