Songfacts®:

• This was written by and originally recorded by Merle Haggard. Emmylou Harris explained to The Sun June 6, 2008 why she was so fond of this song: "It's such a beautiful elegy to the loss of someone. The line, 'I'll never swim Kern River again' sums up being in the presence of deep grief and loss so eloquently. I've never seen Kern River but I have my own Kern River."
• The Kern River is a river that flows through the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.
• In our interview with Emmylou Harris, she talked about Merle Haggard's influence. "If you had to pick one artist to represent country music and send it into outer space to let people out there in other galaxies know what you mean by country music, I think you could drop a needle on anything that Merle has ever done and get a pretty good representation," she said.