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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

FYI: In a nutshell: Play a Manitoba song, but censor the lyrics

By: Tombits... / Tom Oleson

Posted: 11/14/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

There were a lot of war movies on television on Remembrance Day. One old one starring Robert Ryan featured a scene of a bunch of GIs and their British girlfriends standing around a piano singing The Red River Valley. There's nothing remarkable about that, except that it indicated that either the girls had been spending a lot of time with a lot of sentimental GIs -- they all knew the words -- or that the song is a lot more popular internationally than North Americans think it is.

Be that as it may, most musicologists think the song comes from the Red River Valley in Texas, but a few think it actually originated out of Manitoba's Red River Valley and that the line "The cowboy who loved you so true should actually read "the Metis" or "the soldier." The Americans probably have the stronger claim here, but that doesn't mean Manitoba, especially Winnipeg, doesn't have songs of its own, although not all of them are as melodic or family oriented as Red River Valley.

A colleague emailed me this week an enquiry about a song called Three Old Whores from Winnipeg. The song was not familiar to me, and at first I thought she was confusing it with another old ballad, The Winnipeg Whore, which I once heard performed by two elderly, drunken English remittance men at the bar of the Press Club, but she was right. They are distinct songs, although in spirit, as their titles suggest, not all that distinct.

It would be useful to quote lines from them to show what the atmosphere was like in at least parts of Winnipeg in the late 19th and early 20th century when the city was booming, but aside from definite and indefinite articles, prepositions and pronouns, there is hardly a word in either song that can be quoted in a family newspaper.

As indelicate as these songs may be, they are a reminder of how colourful the history of this province is, as dramatic as any other's. We've had a massacre, a rebellion, a general strike, and that's just for starters. And we have our music, such as it is. What do other provinces have to compare to The Winnipeg Whore? "The Easy Edmontonian" just doesn't cut it.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 14, 2009 H2

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