Who originally sang "Clementine"? I need to know right away--very important.?

Question

I know that Bobby Darin sang this one, but, I need to know who really did the original one. Thanks! Please answer right away. I'm doing a research paper for a song analysis.

Answer 1

Mark Owen

Answer 2

Oh My Darling, Clementine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
"Oh My Darling, Clementine" is an American western folk ballad usually credited to Percy Montrose (1884), though sometimes to Barker Bradford. The song is believed to have been based on another called "Down by the River Liv'd a Maiden" by H. S. Thompson (1863).

The words are those of a bereaved lover singing about his darling, the daughter of a "49er", (a miner in the 1849 California Gold Rush). He loses her in a drowning accident – though he consoles himself towards the end of the song with Clementine's "little sister".

Oh My Darling, Clementine quickly became popular, especially with scouts and other groups of young people, as a campfire and excursion song, and there are several different versions of the words. (There is even a Scottish version, the Climbing Clementine, which begins "In a crevice, high on Nevis...") The lyrics most often sung are those shown below.

The verse about the little sister was often left out of folk song books intended for children, presumably because it seemed morally questionable.

The song was used as the title of the 1946 film My Darling Clementine, which tells the tale of the Gunfight at the OK corral in Tombstone, Arizona. In the film Wyatt Earp falls in love with a school-teacher called Clementine. It is also a famous catchphrase of cartoon character Huckleberry Hound, who would sing it horrendously off-key.

Tom Lehrer wrote a parody of the song, "improving" it by singing each verse in the style of a famous artist or genre: Cole Porter, Mozart, Jazz and Gilbert and Sullivan. It was also parodied on Red Dwarf, where Lister sings the first verse, taking place in an asteroid, with an old plutonium miner. The Clementine mission was named after the song, as (once it is complete) the spacecraft was "lost and gone forever".

In his book South from Granada, Gerald Brenan attributes the melody to originally being an old Spanish ballad, which was made popular by Mexican miners during the Gold Rush, and given various English texts. No particular source is cited to verify that the song he used to hear in the 1920s in a remote Spanish village was not an old text with new music, but Brenan states in his preface that all facts mentioned in the book have been checked reasonably well.

Answer 3

This web page says he co-wrote it with Woody Harris, check it out scroll down almost to half the page and read the paragraph about that song.

Answer 4

I would go with Stephen Foster.