I recently finished a book called Forever Words: The Unknown Poems by Johnny Cash. This collection of Johnny Cash's poems and lyrics was published posthumously in 2016. It's a great book if you're a fan of The Man in Black.
So how does this relate to L.M. Montgomery? Well, as I was reading the book, I read the lyrics for a song Johnny Cash wrote in the 1970s called "Chinky Pin Hill." (It's now been recorded in a beautiful rendition by I'm With Her). The third stanza of the song reads:
We'll stop in Rainbow Valley
Where the church is standing still
And we'll be newlywed married
On Chinky Pin Hill
Where the church is standing still
And we'll be newlywed married
On Chinky Pin Hill
Seeing the name "Rainbow Valley" got my attention because it's the name of the seventh book in the Anne of Green Gables series. L.M. Montgomery's Rainbow Valley was published in 1919.
Johnny Cash had capitalized Rainbow Valley as a real, definable place. Could Cash have come across Montgomery's Anne series on a bookshelf somewhere and remembered the name? Or was there a real Rainbow Valley out there?
I started digging around the internet. It turns out that there is a Rainbow Valley on Mount Everest where many climbers have fallen to their deaths in their colorful gear. Well, I was clearly following the wrong thread there.
I continued searching and came across a cheerful song called "Rainbow Valley" by a band from London called Love Affair from 1968. The lyrics are sweet and charming:
The sun always shines
down in my Rainbow Valley.
There's one that's always mine,
down in my Rainbow Valley.
down in my Rainbow Valley.
There's one that's always mine,
down in my Rainbow Valley.
Maybe this song title made its way into Johnny Cash's lyrics? I also wondered, could Love Affair have been inspired to name their song by L.M. Montgomery's book?
Going back even farther, there's a 1935 film titled Rainbow Valley starring John Wayne. I wonder what inspired the title of this film. Were all these people simply influenced by rainbows in valleys, or could they have been inspired by one another?
What's in a name? My hours of digging provided me with no definitive answers. Sometimes art is all about hidden dialogues and connection, picking up inspiration from people, words, sounds, and observations and putting them all together in unexplainable ways to create something new.
Created May 10, 2022.
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