I was up in Cambridge the other day and aside from the usual insistence my mental jukebox has of lining up Pink Floyd songs, the chalked up directions to the Cam got me thinking about ‘river songs’ – songs either about or with rivers in their title.
Once I’d started thinking though it was quite the flood. However, here’s a quick Top Five:
Nick Drake – River Man
Pixies – River Euphrates
Bob Dylan – Red River Shore
I think that period from Oh Mercy to Time Out of Mind was one of Dylan’s finest so Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Seties Vol.8 is a real treasure trove and this is a real gem upon it.
REM – Find The River
Bruce Springsteen – The River
Was there ever any question this would be here?
Of course there could also be CCR’s ‘Green River’ (‘Proud Mary’ being overdone), Ocean Colour Scene’s ‘Riverboat Song’, ‘Dam That River’ by Alice In Chains, ‘Five Feet High and Rising’…..
Mumbling About... 
Here’s some other good ones:
River Deep, Mountain High – Ike and Tina Turner
Take me to the River – Talking Heads version
River – Joni Mitchell
One Tree Hill – U2 “it runs like a river runs to the sea”
Old Man River – Paul Robeson
Yeah they were all pouring through, I was surprised just how many there are. Odd though that Joni’s seems to be considered a Christmas song too
Well, it’s in the first line of the song. Oddly, I own two versions of that song, neither of them hers. One is James Taylor who has a real nice Christmas album, the other is by Herbie Hancock whose CD I just rediscovered by accident while trying to clean out my office. It’s called “River: The Joni Letters” and he won a Grammy for it a few years ago.