“Yes, the river knows,” crooned Jim Morrison. Nick Drake softly sang of The River Man. Leonard Cohen heard the river answer. The Band offered up their River Hymn.

“I was born by the river,” cried out Sam Cooke in a way that suggested an estuary of tears might turn to baptismal waters that would deliver his people from the chains of history in which they sang. Springsteen’s river, a symbol of redemption that might release him from a marriage gone cold and the weight of dreams that had become lies or something worse. The Mississippi river that is the spine of Huckleberry Finn. The Ohio river that swept John and Pearl to safety in The Night Of The Hunter. The Tiber, on which Romulus and Remus were set adrift, watched over by the river deity Tiberinus, who delivered them to be suckled by Lupa the wolf. The Nile that bore Moses away from the murderous Pharaoh in a basket of bulrushes coated with pitch.
Then there’s Creedence’s Green River, maybe a metaphor for the Mekong, or the fictional Nung river from Apocalypse Now. Down by the River, where Neil Young shot his baby. Tim Hunter’s film River’s Edge. The bourgeois killer of Banks of the Ohio by the Blue Sky Boys. Flannery O’Connor’s tragic parable The River from A Good Man Is Hard To Find.
The apocalyptic river in flood: John Lee Hooker’s Tupelo, Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks, Sinatra’s River Stay Way From My Door. Driftwood on the River by Ernest Tubb. Weary River by Roy Acuff. The River of Nine Sorrows by The Grateful Dead. Lost on the River by Hank Williams. Roll on, Columbia by Woody Guthrie. Harlem River Quiver by Duke Ellington. The Moon Fell In The River by Count Basie. Whiskey River. Moody River. River In The Pines by Joan Baez. Big River by Johnny Cash. Blue River by Elvis Presley. Many rivers to cross. Cry me a river. Love is a lonesome river. Somewhere down the crazy river. You don’t pull no punches but you don’t push the river. Take me to the river…
Shall we gather at the river?