Red River Dialect Share “Red River,” a Song About Their Name, and Naming.

Ahead of the release of Red River Dialect‘s Abundance Welcoming Ghosts on September 27, hear the album’s third and final single “Red River,” which narrates the history of the language—a creole of Cree, Scots, Gaelic, and Ojibwa spoken in Manitoba—from which the band take their name, and the colonial dynamic replicated in the process: the “narrowing Throat of the World.”

Songwriter David Morris elaborates:

“After being accepted to spend the year at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia I looked it up on a map and discovered that it was situated at the end of a Red River Road. Beyond the end of that dirt road, there is an abandoned yellow house, and then a 9km trail to an abandoned settlement at Pollett’s Cove, beyond which the peninsula extends further into wilderness. Various Red Rivers have come into my life since taking on this name over a decade ago, including the discovery that there is one that flows through Hayle in Cornwall, and a local pub called the Red River Inn nearby. This song, however, is an attempt to speak some of the particular history of the near extinct language from which I took a name for a musical project.”

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra6SSfWNJYw&list=PLGLGDT-9ZI4IEE4yMsT473IPZSCBB0LzG]

Uncut has published a lovely review of the album by Erin Osmon, who writes:

“Straddling past and present, this is Red River Dialect’s most sunny and easygoing record to date… The record’s brilliance is most evident in its seamless shifts within the jam, as well as its general air of jubilance. Its earthen quality and atmospheric ease mirrors the mountains, rivers, and forests sung about by bandleader David Morris, a practicing Buddhist whose enlightenment is revealed through his lyrical poems and traditionally minded delivery.”

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Recorded in rural Southwest Wales shortly before songwriter and singer David Morris moved to a remote Buddhist monastery in Nova Scotia, their fifth album captures the band finding fresh joy in their music, relaxing more deeply into a natural, playful confidence: tangling with the thickets, wading in the river, digging the peat, and disappearing into the mountains. 

  • Photo by Jimmy Robertson.
  • Photo by Alice Jackson
  • Photo by Brian Robinson.

Use coupon code GHOSTS during checkout through Sept. 27 for 40% off Red River Dialect’s prior album Broken Stay Open Sky.

Use Coupon Code GHOSTS for 40% Off “Broken Stay Open Sky”

$9.00 – $30.00

Red River

You wrote to me, you were looking for
Someone who could translate
Two words into the language of
The ancestors of the late
Mother of your partner, who wanted a tattoo
Of the words her mother chanted when
Breathing was hard to do.
She spoke these words in English
But you wanted to know their names
In the dialect of the Saulteaux Métis;
A tongue whose name I’d claimed.

I took a name, I took a name in vain
Run Red River, flood the conquered plain
Did I take a name, did I take a name from veins?
Run Red River, breathing blood speak up again

Let it in, let it in, let it in, let it flow
Narrowing, narrowing, narrowing: Throat of the world

Can I breathe in the bad and breathe out the good
I see those men stalking through the twisting wood
And the white stone dam of guilt that glows
Like the white knights armour; let the Red River flow

To the fork of the Red and Assiniboine rivers,
From Orkney and the Hebrides,
Men came to trap and trade fur for
The Hudson Bay Company.
They spoke Scots English, Gaelic and Orcadian.
The women who they took for wives
Were Cree of the First Nations.
The ‘Red River Dialect’ became the English name
For the lilting Mantitoba Métis speech
Heard around the Saulteaux plain.
Like the Michif language, Cree don’t say he or she,
But I know that white man’s hunger ate
The speech of the Métis.

{chorus}

[youtube https://youtu.be/ra6SSfWNJYw]

[youtube https://youtu.be/MvG8A_iobNA]

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Cornwall’s answer to the Waterboys bring elemental paean.

– MOJO

Red River Dialect have always ploughed their own furrow, with each album taking them to deeper and deeper levels, far beneath the soil. A rich, fulsome, lyrical experience, Abundance Welcoming Ghosts finds the band’s ragged, intense Americana rooted in the weight of history, with each song feeling torn from Victorian newspaper reports.

– Clash

The band stretches out a rhapsodic melody like a ribbon chasing the wind.

–  NPR

Thoughtful compositions that mix straightforward observation with naturalistic imagery and philosophical inquiry.

– Uncut

Beatific [but] thrillingly combustible. Morris’s earnest tones crack with loss. A rare British treasure.

– MOJO

Frenzied and fantastic… a radical, thundering realm [of[ sweeping, massive songs that incorporate old world folk and the tension of noise and drone music with equal force.

– UPROXX

An album of breathtakingly rare beauty. A classic in every sense.

– Echoes and Dust

A beguilingly atmospheric record… imagine Steve Gunn transplanted to Kernow and you’d be close. 

– Clash

An album of breathtakingly rare beauty. A classic in every sense.

– Echoes and Dust

Brimming with glorious dizzying energy and tension, primitive and cut loose from modern constraints. Impossible to resist.

– Folk Radio UK