Remember the Red River Valley

A story, a drink and a song

I was watching the movie based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, and there’s this scene where a little boy with the sweetest voice sings Red River Valley to Reese Witherspoon. I hadn’t heard that song in I don’t know how long, and in an instant I was transported—in that way that a song can flip a switch and turn your mind (and your heart) into a four-chord time machine. Know what I mean?

I was no longer a late-middle-aged man reclined on my couch watching Reese Witherspoon’s hit movie. I was eight or nine years old, and it was 1966 or 67. My older sister Debi and I were staying with our grandparents somewhere in Sacramento. I don’t remember why or for how long, yet I’m sure I could draw an accurate floorplan of the tiny one-bedroom bungalow they had. Memory is such a rickety contraption.

My mother’s father was of Irish-Mexican-Yaqui descent. His surname was Irish, but he was raised by his mother Jesuscita Yberra. He was born in 1911, grew up as a migrant field worker, kicked around Arizona and Texas, did a stint in the Navy, a couple years in San Quentin for running a bar that was also a brothel, and spent most of his working life in fields and canneries up and down California. 

But, that summer in Sacramento, I didn’t know any of that. I knew his name was Art Kelly, but everyone in the family just called him Papa, his kids, his grandkids, his nieces and nephews, even his kids’ spouses. And I knew he worked as a foreman at the Hunt’s Cannery.

Late in the afternoons he came home in his mustard yellow Chevy pickup, and sometimes he brought Mexican sweet breads or real chicharrones for Debi and me.

It was hot, and the little bungalow didn’t have anything but a small electric fan that sat on a table. Not even a swamp cooler. Dorothy Gramma actually did that thing where you put a bowl of ice in front of the fan. As the ice melts the cool air rises above the bowl and is dispersed by the fan. Old-school poor man’s AC.

But the little house would still be hot and miserable, and Papa would say “Let’s take a shorty,” and we would load up in the truck, him and Dorothy Gramma in the front, Debi and me in the pickup bed. Yes, that’s really how it was done in those days—no seat belts, no air bags, not even a pillow or a blanket against the wood and metal of the truck bed, just two kids lifted up by two strong arms, plopped into the truck and told to sit down and hold on. 

We would stop at a corner store and pick up cold beer and sodas. Papa always drank Olympia, and Gramma always poured hers into the Tupperware cup she kept in the glove compartment. We would wind our way out into the wider valley on narrow roads with orchards and crops on both sides, a right turn here, a left there. He knew all the backroads, and we would always end up down by the Sacramento River, where Papa and Gramma sipped their beers and Debi and I skipped rocks on the water.

As evening came on, we would ride back home, and Papa would cook chorizo and eggs or maybe rice and refried beans with tortillas. I don’t remember a television in that house. They had a small plastic clock radio that sat on the green formica table in the little dining area. The dial was always tuned to 1140 KRAK Radio in Sacramento—Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, no Beatles, no Rolling Stones. Papa did all the cooking and he always cooked with the radio on. And he always drank while he cooked.

After dinner and several more beers, when the summer sky was finally darkening and the house was cool and still, Papa would pull out an old gut-string guitar. He would tune it up by ear and strum loudly and sing Cielito Lindo, the traditional Mexican party song.

Ay-yai-yai-yai, canta y no llores, porque cantando se alagran, cielito lindo, los corazones. (Sing and don’t be tearful, because singing gladdens, my pretty darling, the hearts.) At the time, Debi and I had no idea what the song meant but we loved to sing along with the ay-yai-yai-yai’s.

Then he would sing Red River Valley in a quiet, scratchy and nasal tenor with his hint of a Mexican accent. He stood in the middle of the cramped living room—Papa rarely sat down anyway and claimed standing allowed him to drink more—and somehow he held the guitar up without a strap, and he sang the song soft and sad and brimming with memory.

I remember the squarish gray sofa with the white doilies on its flat, broad armrests. And the two-and-a-half-foot-long stuffed baby alligator that sat on the coffee table along with the huge ceramic ashtray and a stack of Gramma’s True Detective magazines. I don’t mean stuffed like a fuzzy toy, I mean a real baby alligator preserved by a taxidermist. (Apparently these were a popular decorative item in Mexico back in the day, who knows why.)

And that’s where I went when the little boy in the movie sang to Reese Witherspoon. I was sitting on that couch in that living room, next to my sister, transfixed by my grandfather standing in the lamplight with that old beatup guitar, singing Red River Valley like he’d lived every word.

Somewhere in a shoebox I still have a photograph where I’m so small he carried me on one shoulder… Once, he walked and talked me through a field of wildflowers and bumblebees to show me how to be brave… In 1969, he sent me a cheesy “3-D” postcard of Neil Armstrong on the moon… When I was eleven, he let me shoot his .30.06 rifle and laughed when the kick knocked me on my ass… My parents threw a party when I graduated high school, and they gave me a portable TV, and some of their friends gave me Hallmark cards and money, and Papa gave me a twelve pack of Oly… Another time he invited me to help myself to a beer from his fridge, where I discovered the head of a goat he was prepping for soup. He laughed then too.

Years later, after Gramma died, his drinking got hardcore and full-time and he could be mean and bitter in the afternoons, hanging out in local dives, getting into fights with men half his age. And the last time I saw him he blasted me for being strung out on speed and bumming off my mom—and I was guilty of both in those days. But I said no matter what he thought, I still loved him. And those were the last words between us. He died of cancer in 1984 while I was living in a car in Santa Barbara trying to get clean. I didn’t know until weeks later.

A few days after seeing the Wild movie, I got online and learned the chords to Red River Valley. It’s a lovely folk song of unconfirmed origins, probably Canadian according to Wikipedia, but first commercially popularized in the American Southwest in the 1920s. It perfectly captures the wistful sorrow of saying goodbye to a departing lover. 

When I sing it, I’m in that living room again with Papa, and all those other memories are in orbit around me, in the rhythm and the chords and the plaintive melody and the sad story of parting. For me, no other single song is as inextricably connected to one particular person as Red River Valley is connected to my grandfather.

That’s what songs can do. You know what I mean.

After I wrapped up this piece I filled a glass and made this video. It’s lo-fi and half-whisky’d, and I suppose that’s as it should be. Here’s to you Papa.