Rivers wind their way through American music. Beyond lyric and metaphor, what can physical rivers tell us about what makes a great song?

At the famed “meeting of waters,” near the city of Manaus, Brazil, the café-au-lait-colored Solimões River encounters the espresso-colored Rio Negro. At first, the streams of water flow alongside each other in polite parallel, like contrasting bars on a flag, before the first tentative swirls form. A few miles downstream, the Amazon, birthed from its light and dark tributaries, is fully mixed. But while it appears uniform, the Amazon still carries the chemical signature of its contrasting parts and the terrain from which they emerged: light-colored sand and silt from the Andes Mountains in the Solimões, dark tannins from forested swamps in the Negro.

And so, a great river is composed of the varied inputs of all that has drained into it, churning them together even as its legacy constituents remain detectable to those who look beneath the surface.

As it is with a great song. Absorbing diverse influences (derived from the Latin influent or “flowing in”), a great song blends them together into something recognizably new. Yet the component parts are still there, chemical traces of the sonic terrain traveled by its tributaries.

These musical musings of a river scientist were inspired by a great song, appropriately titled “River,” by Jason Isbell. Beyond its contribution to the river-song tradition, this is the kind of songwriting we need today — songs that synthesize, into a more perfect union, cultural strains that might otherwise too quickly drain toward polarized channels.

How Jason Isbell’s “River” Joins the Two Tributaries of River Song Tradition

People have been writing poems and songs about rivers since, well, in the beginning (Genesis 2:10: “Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden”).

And ever since, songs about rivers can be divided roughly into two Biblically themed tributaries: 1) those about sinners, disasters and punishments and 2) those about redemption, grace and bounty.

In “River,” from his 2020 album Reunions, Jason Isbell gathers up the tributaries into a blended new channel, creating something of an Amazon River for American river songs.

To understand what Isbell has done, consider the divided lyrical landscapes from which river songs flow (here’s a Spotify playlist of these songs).

On one side, rivers chasten, disrupt and destroy. They catch fire (“Burn On”), flood (“When the Levee Breaks”, “Louisiana 1927”) and obliterate whole towns (“Night of the Johnstown Flood”). Murders take place on their shores (“Down by the River” and “Banks of the Ohio”), as does a gunfight that claims the life of a headstrong boy (“Powerderfinger”). When dammed, they flood valleys and cause social displacement and suicide (“Uncle Frank”). And, tragically, they are the channels where bodies float as grim rebuke to a society that turned its back on immigrants (“Matamoros Banks”).

On the other side, rivers bless and redeem. They are where you go to be cleansed (“Take Me to the River”) and washed free of sin (“Down to the River to Pray”, “The River Jordan”, and “Meet Me by the River’s Edge”). They offer refuge in a life of chaos (“River Song”) and ultimate destination as life winds down (“Find the River”). In service to people, they bring light to the darkness (“Roll on Columbia”) and lift whole regions out of poverty (“TVA”).

American river songs tend to flow within one tributary or the other. So “The River” can be refuge from life’s challenges (Bruce Springsteen’s song with that title) or it can be where the weight of sin and small-town judgement drives a young woman to take her own life (Audra Mae’s “The River,” with its dark-tributary echoes of Dolly Parton’s “The Bridge” from 1968).

Rarely, if ever, does a song attempt to draw together the tributaries of dark and light for a lyrical meeting of waters.

With “River,” Jason Isbell has done just that.

River as Savior, River as Criminal

The song opens within the gentle currents of the tributary of light:

The river is my savior, because she used to be a cloud…

and even when she dries up, a thousand years from now,

I’ll lay myself beside her, and call her name out loud.”

Then the first, tentative mixing of light and dark waters:

The river is my savior, the only one I'll ever need

Wash my head when I've been sinnin', wash my knuckles when they bleed

Hmm, we can recognize the river in its familiar role as cleanser of sin. But then: Why are his knuckles still bleeding?

On cue, the river transforms from redemptive sanctuary to crime scene, a jarring lyrical juxtaposition; its sonic equivalent would be to drop Neil Young’s dissonant guitar solo from “Down by the River” into the middle of the ethereal “Down to the River to Pray” from Alison Krauss.

The river hears my secrets, things I cannot tell a soul

Like the children that I've orphaned, and the fortune that I stole

The neighbor who asked questions, till he washed up on the shoal…

We are now sinking in the dark tributary, shrouded in a miasma of crime and death. Even further, the river is more than crime scene, it is an active accomplice to the crime:

Protect me from my neighbor, all his jealousy and greed

Take the body to the delta, hide the weapon in the weeds

In this telling, the river helps the killer by disposing of the body and hiding the murder weapon in its tangled riparian vegetation.

From this dark place, the meeting of waters begins.

The narrator grows increasingly lost and haunted, unable to sleep or shelter his family from his rage. So, he turns back to the river, recognizing that it was accomplice to sin only because he made it so, and that his body can follow the same flow path downstream toward redemption.

The river is my savior, she's running to the sea

And to reach her destination is to simply cease to be

And running till you're nothing sounds a lot like being free

So I'll lay myself inside her and I'll let her carry me

This is not river as redeemer of sin through a pleasant cleanse. No, redemption and serenity can only be achieved with a full commitment from the narrator. And while the song flows from an American form that is traditionally shot through with Judeo-Christian imagery of sin and redemption, the resolution in “River” comes in a very Buddhist construct: eternity and peace as nothingness. With this imagery, Isbell merges more than just the dark and light tributaries of American river songs, he tethers the form to an even broader tradition: Rivers are sources of life and sanctity to nearly all cultures and religions.

As a river scientist, I have to add that “River” is the most hydrologically accurate river song that I’ve encountered, its narrative arc tracking the water cycle from cloud to river to delta and sea. The song’s lyrics are awash in references to places and actions that work as both story elements and as river forms and processes—a poet could recognize their meaning, but so could a fluvial geomorphologist. In a river, shoals are where the flow’s energy drops, allowing sand and gravel to deposit. In “River,” a shoal is also where bodies deposit.

Did Isbell intend to achieve such scientific precision as well as a historic joining of the two tributaries of American river song tradition? I don’t really know—but it is consistent with his overall songwriting style to embrace complexity and fuse together diverse elements from across the sonic and cultural landscape. He was a member of Drive-by Truckers when they tackled the full complexity of hydropower dams, rivers and people through a pair of songs (one from each of the dark and light tributaries of river songs above). In “TVA” they celebrated how dams can electrify rural regions and bring broad economic uplift, while in “Uncle Frank” they showed how dam development, including dams built by the TVA, can inflict suffering on those who get displaced by rising reservoirs. There is truth in both songs and value in being exposed to those diverse perspectives.

“River” and so many other songs in Isbell’s catalog source their inspiration from disparate parts of our culture’s increasingly fractured terrain—and flow toward a place beyond that fracturing. They exemplify what writer David Brooks called a “grand synthesis that can move us beyond the current divide.” As culture wars become entrenched, songs have some role to play in forging that kind of synthesis, including those that evoke the great rivers and their ability to merge unified flowing channels from diverse sources.