You're a Grand Old Rio

If you want to get depressed — and who doesn’t? — just consider the Rio Grande. Basically, it’s been a rough summer for the Rio. It’s drying up.

As Anne Marken, manager of the Water Operations Division of New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley Conservation District, earlier this month told KUNM news:

This year has been one of the worst, if not the worst, year on record for Middle Valley water supply, and that’s really just a result of the record low snowpack we saw in the mountains this winter, the above average temperatures we’ve been experiencing, and a lackluster monsoon season, combined with incredibly dry basin conditions. …

Marken said there are more than 82 miles of dry river in her district, which runs between Cochiti Pueblo and Elephant Butte Lake.

They’ve been tracking river channel drying for 25 years, and the average river miles dry in a year is closer to 37. So we’re more than double what we typically see for as far as river channel drying goes. There are about 13 river miles dry in the Albuquerque area, and the extent of that drying, it runs from around Paseo del Norte down to south of the Rio Bravo Bridge, so right through the heart of Albuquerque. And this is only the third year since the 1980s that the river through Albuquerque has dried. So it dried in 2022, 2025, and now this year.

Like I said, depressing …

But even though it’s dry right now, the Rio Grande is worth celebrating. So here are a few of my favorite songs about this river.

Let’s start with this classic, written by Johnny Mercer and sung in the 1936 movie Rhythm on the Range by that old cowhand Bing Crosby with some help from Martha Raye, Leonid Kinskey, Bob Burns, The Sons of the Pioneers and the greatest cowpoke to ever poke a cow, Louis Prima!

Here’s a pretty one called “Moon Over the Rio Grande” by Michael Nesmith. A lot of people don’t know this, but Monkee Mike used to own a home in Nambe — less than 10 miles from the Rio Grande. I interviewed him there in the late ‘90s:

This is my favorite Tom Russell song. Here the narrator sings about being kicked out of his El Paso home by his wife or girlfriend. He stumbles down to Juarez for a depressing bender, obsessing about his situation as well as the classic noir movie Touch of Evil. “Now I’m thinking about the movie / The bar I’m in, the bridge, the Rio Grande / Now I’m thinking about my baby / And the borderline ‘tween a woman and a man…”

Here’s a lighter one from The Austin Lounge Lizards. I heard a rumor, which I made up myself, that these Texans wrote “Big Rio Grande River” while staying at The La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe:

Now let’s get surreal with Brian Wilson’s “Rio Grande” from his self-titled 1988 album. I always thought it sounded like it belonged in the soundtrack of an imaginary Pee Wee Herman western. I bet Bing, Martha, Louie and their pals could have made some real magic with this one.

Finally, here’s a Dave Alvin song that’s about another river. But the chorus, “Someday it’s gonna rain, someday it’s gonna pour / Someday this old dry river, it well, won’t be dry anymore …” makes me think of my beloved Rio Grande:

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