“The Julia Belle Swain” was written by John Hartford, the songwriter and banjo player whose lifelong love of riverboats shaped much of his music. He recorded it for his 1976 album “Mark Twang.”
The song is a tribute to a real steamboat, the Julia Belle Swain, a steam-powered sternwheeler built in the early 1970s. Hartford, who often piloted the boat himself, sings of its captain and its crew of old hippies and pictures it racing other well-known steamboats; the song carries the freedom and good humor of life on the river.
River songs run through Hartford’s catalog, and “The Julia Belle Swain” is one of them.
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