A History of American Literature

198 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865

Pike, / Who crossed the wide prairies with her lover Ike,” begins one version of

“Sweet Betty from Pike,” “Saying ‘Good-bye Pike county, farewell for a while, / We’ll

come back again when we panned out our pile.’ ” In some versions of the song, it is

“the big mountains” Betty crosses to make her fortune. In all versions, she has

various adventures, crossing “the terrible desert” or fighting “the Injun’” or suffering

“Starvation and cholera, hard work and slaughter.” And, in many, she is a powerful

figure, a strong woman who scorns her lover when he declares his intention of

fleeing “from the death lurkin’ there” in the West back to Pike County. “You’ll go by

yourself if you do,” she informs him. Other songs also tell of crossing the American

continent in search of a fortune, only to give it up. “I’ve wandered all over this

country, / Prospecting and digging for gold,” the narrator of a piece called “Acres of

Clams” admits; but then he confesses, realizing that “for one who got rich by mining”

“there were hundreds grew poor,” he made up his mind “to try farming.” “No longer

the slave of ambition, / I laugh at the world and its shams, /” he concludes, “And

think of my happy condition, / Surrounded by acres of clams.” And still other songs

tell simply of those who travel and work as migratory laborers, hired hands, or on

the railroad. “In eighteen hundred and fifty-four / I traveled the land from shore to

shore /,” the narrator of “Pat Works on the Railway” discloses, “I traveled the land from

shore to shore / To work upon the railway.” “In eighteen hundred and fifty-five /

I found myself more dead than alive, /” he adds, “I found myself more dead than

alive / From working on the railway.”

Sometimes the wanderers of these songs find love. One of the most famous white

folk songs of the period, “Shenandoah,” concerns a wandering white trader who falls

in love with the daughter of an Indian chief. Sometimes, as in the equally famous

song about the daughter of “a miner, forty-niner,” “Clementine,” the subject is death.

The tone of such songs can be elegiac, lyrical, as in “Shenandoah”:

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you –

Away, you rolling river;

Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear you –

Away, I’m bound away

‘Cross the wide Missouri

Alternatively, it can be sardonic, even brutal, as in this brief account of the fate of

“my darlin’ Clementine” once she has drowned:

In a churchyard near the canyon,

Where the myrtle doth entwine,

There grow roses and other posies

Fertilized by Clementine.

What most songs have in common, however, is an idiomatic language, images drawn

from a common stock of experience available to the community, and simple

compulsive rhythms, insistent repetition guaranteed to catch attention and remain

stored in the memory. The songs designed for dance as well as singing are, naturally,

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