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Oh My Darling, Clementine is an American western folk ballad usually credited to Percy Montrose (1884), though sometimes to Barker Bradford. The song is believed to have been based on another called Down by the River Liv'd a Maiden by H. S. Thompson (1863).

The words are those of a bereaved lover singing about his darling, the daughter of a "49er", (a miner in the 1849 California Gold Rush). He loses her in a drowning accident – though he consoles himself towards the end of the song with Clementine's "little sister".

Oh My Darling, Clementine has become popular, especially with Scouts and other groups of young people, as a campfire and excursion song, and there are several different versions of the words. (There is even a Scottish version, the Climbing Clementine, which begins "In a crevice, high on Nevis...") The lyrics most often sung are those shown below.

The verse about the little sister was often left out of folk song books intended for children, presumably because it seemed morally questionable.

In his book South from Granada, Gerald Brenan attributes the melody to originally being an old Spanish ballad, which was made popular by Mexican miners during the Gold Rush, and given various English texts. No particular source is cited to verify that the song he used to hear in the 1920s in a remote Spanish village was not an old text with new music, but Brenan states in his preface that all facts mentioned in the book have been checked reasonably well.

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• It is the favorite song of cartoon character Huckleberry Hound, who would sing it horrendously off-key.

• Peter Brooke, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, infamously sang the song on the Late Late Show the day after an IRA bombing.

• The episode "My Darlin' Clementine" of the 1986 television series Tall Tales and Legends, starred Shelley Duvall as the Clementine of legend.

• It is the inspiration for Kate Winslet's character's name in the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Clementine Kruczynski. It was most likely chosen because of the line in the refrain "You were lost and gone forever", as, in the movie, Jim Carrey's character loses memory of Clementine.

• It featured in Back to the Future Part III (1990).

• In the episode Future Echoes in Series 1 of the comedy series Red Dwarf the character Lister sings a modernised version of the song, featuring an "old plutonium miner".

• The song has been adopted by various football teams in the UK as a popular terrace chant.

• The satrist Tom Lehrer wrote a parody of the song, "improving" it by singing each verse in the style of a famous artist or genre: Cole Porter, Mozart, Jazz and Gilbert and Sullivan.

• The tune to this ballad is also frequently adapted by secondary school teachers worldwide to teach about matrix multiplication:

Row by column, row by column,

Multiply them line by line,

Add the products, form a matrix,

Now you're doing it just fine.

• The rock band Guster recorded an album Lost and Gone Forever, whose title is taken from the lyrics of "Oh My Darling, Clementine."

• Dreadful sorry, Clementine is a lyric in the song "Clementine" by Elliott Smith.

• The song was the inspiration of O. P. Nayyar's famous song "Aye Dil Hai Mushkil Jeena Yahan" in the Hindi film C.I.D.

• A cast member in the Fuse TV show Rad Girls is named Darling Clementine.

• The song was used as the title tune of the 1946 film My Darling Clementine, which tells the tale of the Gunfight at the OK corral in Tombstone, Arizona. In the film Wyatt Earp falls in love with a school-teacher called Clementine.

• Metal act System of a Down reference the song in their song "Revenga":

Bleeding in a sink

Poisoning a drink

Burning up

My sweet Clementine

• The song was used as a base for the story "Dreadful Sorry" by Kathryn Reiss

• The song was taught to Jeri Ryan's character Seven of Nine by Robert Picardo's character the Doctor (Star Trek) in an episode of Star Trek: Voyager. Their duet was reprise in a later episode with a macabre tone that better matches the song itself as the Doctor, temporarily free of his ethical programing, actuates Seven's cybernetic implants to cue her refrains.

• The song is played throughout the Korean TV series "Spring Waltz", which follows the story of a couple reunited after a long separation in which he thought she was dead.

• The song was mentioned in MF DOOM's song, "Rhymes like Dimes":

To the gone and lost forever like "O My Darling Clementine"

He hold his heart when he tellin' rhymes

• The song can be used as a mnemonic for Japanese verb terminations:

u tsu ru tte, bu mu nu nde,

su shite, ku ite,

gu ide, suru shite,

kuru kite, reigai, iku itte

The Clementine space mission was named after the song, as (once it is complete) the spacecraft was "lost and gone forever".

• MIDI sound file
• Passage referring to the song in the book South from Granada