Songfacts®:

• Written by folk musician Steve Gillette and his frequent songwriting partner Tom Campbell, "Darcy Farrow" was first recorded by the Canadian folk duo Ian & Sylvia. The song follows the tragic romance of the beautiful Darcy and her faithful fiancé Vandermeer. Darcy is killed when she's thrown from her horse, and the devastated Vandermeer commits suicide, and their sad deaths become legendary in Virginia City. The story was inspired by a much less harrowing situation involving Gillette's sister, who is also named Darcy. As a child, she was kicked by her horse and broke her cheekbone, but she fully recovered and no fiancés were harmed.
  
  "I was a little horrified about the idea since it was so dark and involved my sister's name," Gillette explained. "But as we worked with it and took it in the direction of the old cowboy songs, I was much more comfortable with it. So many of the old cowboy songs take their melodies from Scottish-Irish musical traditions." Campbell spent part of his childhood in the Nevada region, which provided the setting for the song.
• An urban legend suggests Gillette and Campbell were college students who ducked an assignment instructing them to explore undiscovered folk songs in the rural regions of the Mountain West. Instead they wrote the original song "Darcy Farrow" and turned it in to an oblivious professor. Campbell did tell Ian Tyson (of Ian & Sylvia) that he once took a folklore class at UCLA and would hand in original songs and claim that he had discovered them in his grandfather's collection of folk music. Ian thought the story was hilarious and would often repeat it during the live intro to "Darcy Farrow," even though Campbell never explicitly mentioned the song in the story. But according to Gillette, the urban legend is as real as Darcy Farrow herself. He told Ian & Sylvia biographer Jon Einarson: "The story that Tom and I wrote the song to fool a college professor isn't true, but Ian told that story for years. That wasn't the case. We really wrote it just as a song."
• Over 300 artists have covered this, including Steve Gillette on his 1967 self-titled album, but the best known version is John Denver's. He first recorded it for his popular Rocky Mountain High album in 1972, though it wasn't released as a single, and revisited it with multiple live versions. It was also performed by Josh Ritter and Barnstar! on the John Denver tribute album The Music Is You, one of the few songs in the collection not written by Denver.
• This has also been recorded by Nanci Griffith, Jim Croce, The Kingston Trio, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Townes Van Zandt.
• Some fans are so taken with the story of Darcy and Vandermeer that they have searched the high valley regions, "where the Walker runs down to the Carson Valley plain," for the couple's graves.
• Ian & Sylvia performed this live at their 1986 reunion show with Linda Ronstadt (Gillette and Campbell penned many songs for Ronstadt's solo debut and introduced her to the duo). She said: "It's a thrill for me, in a way, to be able to be doing this song. It feels vaguely sacrilegious; it's like adding a third part to the Everly Brothers."
• Steve Gillette posted two free instructional videos to YouTube to teach musicians how to play the song.