Darcy Farrow

Darcy Farrow is a song written by Steve Gillette and Tom Campbell, and first recorded in 1965 by Ian & Sylvia on their album, Early Morning Rain. Gillette released his first recording of it in 1967 on his eponymous album, Steve Gillette. The song has been covered by more than 300 artists, including, most notably, John Denver, who recorded it three times and included the song in his live performances. It is included on the latest tribute album, The Music Is You: A Tribute To John Denver, released on April 2, 2013. Other artists who recorded “Darcy Farrow” are Chesapeake, Jimmy Dale Gilmore, Nanci Griffith, The Kingston Trio, Tony Rice, Josh Ritter, Linda Ronstadt, Ian Tyson (solo), Matthews’ Southern Comfort, Danny Quinn, The Subdudes. The song was written in 1964, inspired by something that happened to Gillette’s little sister, Darcy, when she was 12. She was running behind her horse chasing it into the corral when she was kicked. She broke her cheekbone but had no lasting ill effects. Campbell took a melody that Gillette had written and came up with a story about two young lovers and a tragic fall. The place names are actual places around the region of the high valleys and the Walker River in Nevada, where Tom lived when he was eight or nine years old. An urban legend suggests Gillette and Campbell were college students who ducked an assignment instructing them to explore undiscovered folk songs in the rural regions of the Mountain West. Instead they wrote the original song “Darcy Farrow” and turned it in to an oblivious professor. Campbell did tell Ian Tyson (of Ian & Sylvia) that he once took a folklore class at UCLA and would hand in original songs and claim that he had discovered them in his grandfather’s collection of folk music. Ian thought the story was hilarious and would often repeat it during the live intro to “Darcy Farrow,” even though Campbell never explicitly mentioned the song in the story. But according to Gillette, the urban legend is as real as Darcy Farrow herself. He told Ian & Sylvia biographer Jon Einarson: “The story that Tom and I wrote the song to fool a college professor isn’t true, but Ian told that story for years. That wasn’t the case. We really wrote it just as a song