Down By The River - Lyrics and Music

Lyrics and Music

The lyrics are apparently about someone who kills his lover by shooting her, in the tradition of the mid-60s song "Hey Joe." The reason he gives for the killing is that she takes him to emotional heights from which he cannot bear to go on. Young has provided multiple explanations for the lyrics. In an interview with Robert Greenfield in 1970 Young claimed that "there's no real murder in it. It's about blowing your thing with a chick. It's a plea, a desperate cry." Introducing the song in New Orleans on September 27, 1984 Young claimed that it depicts a man "who had a lot of trouble controlling himself" who catches his woman cheating on him, then meets her down by the river and shoots her. A few hours later the sheriff comes to his house and arrests him.

"Down by the River" begins with electric guitars followed by bass guitar and snare drum before the vocals begin. The vocal sections are taken at a slow tempo. There are long instrumental passages after each of the first two refrains, during which Young plays short, staccato notes on his guitar and incorporates distortion.

Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield calls "Down by the River" and "Cowgirl in the Sand" the "key tracks" on Everybody Knows This is Nowehere, calling them "long, violent guitar jams, rambling over the nine-minute mark with no trace of virtuosity at all, just staccato guitar blasts sounding as though Young is parachuting down into the middle of the Hatfield-McCoy feud. In one solo, the same staccato note is repeated 38 times. Allmusic critic Bill Janovitz describes the groove as "lazy, almost funky," stating that this helps partially obscure the "malevolence in its lyric." However, Janovitz goes on to note that the "very sparseness on 'Down by the River' only acts as a haunting void for its blues, like John Lee Hooker's 'Tupelo.'"