Musicians
“Old Time River Man” is an original song by John Hartford, the singer, fiddler, and songwriter whose deepest subject was the Mississippi River and the steamboat life. He recorded it for his 1989 album “Down on the River.”
The song is a meditation on a vanishing world — the old-time river man, the steamboat pilots and deckhands of an earlier age, and the question of where such a man can go as the river life he knew fades away. Hartford himself had earned a steamboat pilot’s license and worked the water, and the song carries the authority of someone writing from inside that world.
“Old Time River Man” stands among the river songs that were the heart of Hartford’s later work. It has been taken up by other musicians, including his son Jamie Hartford, who kept his father’s river songs in circulation.
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