"River Song" is a song composed by Robert B. Sherman and Richard M. Sherman in 1973. It was sung by

Charley Pride Charley Frank Pride (March 18, 1934 – December 12, 2020) was an American Country music, country singer. Beginning his career as a Negro league baseball player in the early-1950s, he later pursued a career in country music, becoming the gen ...

in the musical motion picture '' Tom Sawyer''. The song score received a Christopher Award and a nomination for an

Academy Award The Academy Awards, commonly known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit in film. They are presented annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in the United States in recognition of excellence ...

. The song's placement as a "bookend" piece to the motion picture was largely due to the Sherman Brothers' deep involvement with the film, including screenwriters as well as

songwriters A songwriter is a person who creates musical compositions or writes lyrics for songs, or both. The writer of the music for a song can be called a composer, although this term tends to be used mainly in the classical music genre and film scoring. ...

. The song is featured on the popular music LP, ''The Brady Bunch Phonographic Album'' which features a total of three Sherman Brothers songs including "River Song."

Inspired by Twain

The Shermans did not know how they would end their screenplay until reading Twain's own conclusion to the book. According to Robert B. Sherman, the "River Song" was inspired by the last page of

Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Fau ...

's book in which Twain writes: "So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop -- that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can." The song reflects this with the lyrics "The boy is gonna grow to a man, to a man/Only once in his life is he free/Only one golden time in his life is he free." The song is used to begin and end the movie, and is set against footage of the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the main stem, primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri River, Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Ita ...

, showing Tom running toward the river, alongside it, swimming in it, etc. Thus both the song and the footage reinforce the metaphor of the boy as a force of nature (i.e., like the river), and also takes inspiration from the opening paragraphs of Twain's semi-autobiographical novel '' Life on the Mississippi''. Songs written by the Sherman Brothers 1973 singles Music based on novels Songs about the United States Songs about the Mississippi River {{1970s-single-stub