Russell Baillie: We'll just go with the flow

Don McGlashan's 'Bathe in The River' has been in the top 10 for the best part of the year.

This column started out as a trickle but quickly turned into a torrent.

The morning after the Apra Silver Scroll Awards - won by Don McGlashan for his Bathe in The River - the discussion at Team TimeOut quickly digressed from the previous night's hangover to a tangential riff on the winning song.

Yes, it may have won the top New Zealand songwriting award and finally be slipping out of the charts having been moored in the top 10 for the best part of the year. It's a certified Kiwi pop treasure now. Which is all very well, but how does it compare with the rest of its genre?

It might be a fine slice of Pacific gospel pop. But essentially it's a river song. There have been a few of those.

Actually, you could probably fill one of those (column product placement imminent) really big iPods to the brim with all the river songs ever written. And that's not counting those pieces of music from countries where the inspirational waterways are called things like Danube and Volga.

What a playlist it would be. They'd be lots of Tina Turner (Proud Mary and River Deep Mountain High), Creedence Clearwater Revival (Proud Mary again 'cos they wrote it, Green River). J.J. Cale (every second song so far as we can tell, doncha love Google?) and Dolly Parton.

Yes, Dolly is the river queen. She's done River of Happiness, The River Unbroken, Satan's River not to mention her hit duet with Kenny Rogers Islands in the Stream ... [cue sound of loud wrong answer buzzer]. No! Despite those memorable lyrics "And we rely on each other, ah-ah/From one lover to another, ah-ah" it doesn't qualify for the purposes of this ramble.

Why? Because if it's in a stream it's not really an island is it? Nice tune and all, but having a metaphorical failure on your chorus hook does not a great river song make. Goodbye Dolly.

That iPod - although perhaps we should change product placement to the iRiver MP3 player - playlist wouldn't be complete without Bruce Springsteen's The River. Or Moon River, Rivers of Babylon, Swanee River, Take Me to the River, Crowded House's Hole in the River, REM's Find the River.

One would have to draw the line somewhere. Possibly at Enya's Orinoco Flow, named after the Venezuelan waterway and not a Womble with a tummy upset. Probably best avoided too is any song titled River of Love or River of Dreams (there's been a few). Definitely out is anything by Styx.

But wouldn't it be fun to have One More River to Cross by Canned Heat followed by Too Many Rivers to Cross by Jimmy Cliff?

Even band-of-the-moment the Killers have a river song on their new album - This River is Wild.

Compared to most of those, McGlashan's song about performing one's ablutions in the local tributary is a gentle, slow-moving thing.

But it's still a great river song. And not just because you can't riverdance to it.