What the song is about
This is a modern house version of "Oh My Darling, Clementine", a famous American folk song from the time of the California Gold Rush. A miner lives in a canyon with his daughter Clementine. One morning, while taking her ducklings to the water, she trips and falls into the sea. The singer cannot swim, so he loses her. The last verse turns it into a joke: he misses her terribly, until he kisses her little sister and forgets Clementine. The song is meant to be funny, even though it is about a sad event.
Useful words and expressions
- cavern: a large cave
- canyon: a deep valley with steep rock walls
- excavating for a mine: digging to make a mine
- dwelt: lived (old-fashioned past of dwell)
- miner: a person who works in a mine
- forty-niner: a person who went to California in 1849 to look for gold
- lost and gone forever: gone and never coming back
- dreadful sorrow: terrible sadness
- herring boxes: small wooden boxes for fish (her feet were so big she wore them as shoes)
- stub your toe: hit your toe hard against something
- splinter: a small, sharp piece of wood
- brine: salty sea water (poetic)
- ruby lips: red lips
- alas: sadly (old-fashioned)
- I was no swimmer: I could not swim
Grammar
- Past simple for telling a story: dwelt, drove, stubbed, fell, lost, missed, kissed, forgot. Note the irregular forms: dwell → dwelt, drive → drove, fall → fell, lose → lost, forget → forgot.
- Present perfect meaning in a fixed phrase: You are lost and gone forever means you have disappeared for ever.
- "How" for strong feeling: How I missed her! means I missed her so much!
- "Until" for a change: How I missed her … until I kissed her little sister. The missing stopped at that moment.
Song language, not everyday English
- Drove she ducklings to the water: the verb comes before the subject for the rhythm. Normal English: She drove her ducklings to the water.
- Dwelt a miner: the same kind of inversion. Normal English: A miner lived there.
- topses: not a real word. It is a joke plural made to rhyme with boxes. The correct form is tops.
- Herring boxes, without topses, sandals were for Clementine: an unusual word order. Normal English: Herring boxes without tops were Clementine's sandals.
- Blowin' is a spoken form of blowing.
- Stubbed her toe against a splinter: a joke in the old song. You usually stub your toe on something big, and a splinter goes into your skin.
- Her shoes were number nine: an old way of giving shoe size. Today we say She wore size nine shoes.