Show Notes:

Way back in 2010 I did a show on railroads but never got around to doing the intended sequel. Today we revisit the topic over the course of two shows, taking a deeper dive into the numerous singers who sang about railroads in a variety of ways. For southern Blacks the appeal of the train was a symbol of power, of freedom and escape. As blues historian Paul Oliver wrote: “In the slavery periods when they were unable to travel between districts without written ‘bonds’ from their owners, the snorting engines, with brilliant furnaces traces their progress and clouds of black smoke that hung in the still air above the tracks long after the screaming whistles had died away, inspired them in awe which their descendants still retain.” This image carried on, in the hard times of the 1920’s and 1930s, when the southern Blacks struggled to make a living and saw the northern cities as their saviors, where work was plentiful and a better life was to be had. As the blues developed, the railroad featured prominently in the songs. Numerous songs were sung about individual trains such as the Flying Crow, the Sunshine Special and the Panama Limited, many simply abbreviated like the C&O (Chesapeake and Ohio), T&P (Texas Pacific) or the L&N (Louisville and Nashville), many songs dealt with the hobos who rode the rails, others dealt with working for the railroad while others retold the famous railroad ballads of John Henry, Railroad Bill and Casey Jones. Many other songs emulated the sound of trains, including notable ones by Bukka White and Blind Willie McTell alongside several instrumental harmonica pieces and vocal imitations. These two shows will spotlight all of these types of railroad blues, both in commercial and field recordings

The title of the first program comes from the song by Henry Thomas. Thomas, nicknamed “Ragtime Texas”, was born in 1874 in Big Sandy, Texas. The 1874 date marks him as one of the eldest-born blues performers on record. Thomas was the archetypal rambling musician who went wherever the railroads would take him. According to Mack McCormick, as told to him from a former railroad conductor, “Ragtime Texas was a big fellow that used to come aboard at Gladewater or Mineola or somewhere in there. I’d always carry him, except when he was too dirty. He was a regular hobo, but I’d carry him most of the time. That guitar was his ticket.” Speaking of his famous “Railroadin’ Some”, William Barlow calls it the most “vivid and intense recollection of railroading” in all the early blues recorded in the 1920’s.

Now we leave Ft. Worth, Texas, then go to Texarkana, and it doubles back to Ft. Worth, come on down to Dallas, change cars, Katy, comin’ through the Territory to Kansas City, and from Kansas City to St. Louis, and from St. Louis, Chicago, I’m on my way but I don’t know where.(quills) Change cars! On the TP, leavin’ Ft. Worth, Texas, going through Dallas, hello, Terrell, Grand Saline, Silver Lake, Mineola, Tyler, and Longview, Jefferson, Marshall, Little Sandy, Big Sandy, Texarkana, and it doubles back to Ft. Worth. (quills) Change cars! On the Katy, leavin’ Dallas, Texas, comin’ through Rockwall, hello, Greenville, Celeste, Denison, South McAlester, Territory, Muskogee, ol’ Wagoner, Parson, Kansas, Kansas City, Sedalia, then I change cars, and jump in St. Louis. (quills) Hello, Springfield, I’m on my way, Chicago! (quills) Bloomington (quills) Joliet, get on a high-ball, pass on through. I high-ball on through, sir. (quills) Grand Crossing, (quills) Thirty-First Street Depot, (quills) Polk Street Depot, (quills) Chicago! (quills)

The second show takes it’s title from the Lucille Bogan song, “I Hate That Train Called The M And O.” The song refers to the Mobile and Ohio Railroad (M&O) and was planned to span the distance between the seaport of Mobile, Alabama and the Ohio River near Cairo, Illinois. Several artists sang about the M&O including Walter Davis whose “M&O Blues” was a hit in 1930 and Willie Brown’s “M&O Blues” cut the same year. The M&O is just one of numerous trains named in the blues and we hear songs about the B&O, C.C. and O., Frisco, Dixie Flyer, K.C. Railway, Rock Island and Pacific, Mobile-Central, Santa Fe, Illinois Central, Flying Crow Blues, L & N, Sun Beam Blues, Sunshine Special, Texas & Pacific among others.

“Sunshine Special” by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Frenchy’s String Band, refers the train of the same name which was inaugurated by the Missouri Pacific Railroad on December 5, 1915, providing service between St. Louis, Little Rock, and destinations in Texas. The Sunshine Special served as the flagship of Missouri Pacific Railroad’s passenger train service. Several songs make reference to the Flying Crow, a train line connecting Port Arthur, Texas to Kansas City with major stops in Shreveport and Texarkana. Black Ivory King, Carl Davis & the Dallas Jamboree Jug Band, Dusky Dailey, Washboard Sam and Oscar Woods all recorded songs about the train. Other songs dealing with specific trains featured today include Jack Ranger’s “T.P. Window Blues” ( Texas Pacific Railroad), , Sparks Brothers‘ “I.C. Train Blues” (Illinois Central Railroad) [Furry Lewis and Tampa Red also sang about this train], Little Brother Montgomery’s “A. & V. Railroad Blues” (Alabama & Vicksburg Railroad), Billiken Johnson’s “Sun Beam Blues” (Sunbeam was a named passenger train operated from 1925 to 1955 between Houston and Dallas by the Texas and New Orleans Railroad), Andrew and Jim Baxter’s “K C Railroad Blues” and “K.C. Moan” by the Memphis Jug Band (Kansas City Southern Railway), George Noble’s “The Seminole Blues” (Seminole Gulf Railway), and Pink Anderson & Simmnie Dooley’s “C.C. and O. Blues” (Chesapeake and Ohio),Little Brother Montgomery “Frisco Hi-Ball Blues” and Billiken Johnson’s “Frisco Blues” (St. Louis–San Francisco Railway),  Little Brother Montgomery’ “Santa Fe Blues” (Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway), Clara Smith  “The L & N Blues “(Louisville and Nashville Railroad), Blind Norris & Whistlin’ Alex Moore’s ” The Katy Blues” (the Missouri, Texas, Kansas, Texas line), Lillian Glinn’s “Cannon Ball Blues” (an Illinois Central passenger train routing between Chicago and New Orleans, now known as the City of New Orleans), Leroy Carr “Big Four Blues” (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad) and his “Alabama Woman Blues” (“Did you ever go down on the Mobile and K.C. line/I just want to ask you, did you ever see that girl of Mine/I rode the Central, and I hustled the L&N/The Alabama woman they look like section men”), Monkey Joe “New York Central” (operating in the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic regions). Other trains mentioned in blues songs include The Wabash Cannon Ball (usually called the Cannon Ball) and The Seaboard train. The Cannonball refers to several lines traveling throughout the middle and western United States from as early as the 1880s while the The Seaboard train connected southern states starting in Virginia and southward to the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.

Big Bill Broonzy’s “Southern Blues” contains one of the most celebrated of all railroad blues phrases, “where the Southern crosses the Dog.” In about 1903 this line changed the course of W. C. Handy’s life, and also that of the history of the blues. As he famously recalled: “…one night at Tutwiler (Mississippi), as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start. A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. …As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly. Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.” The “Southern,” was the Southern railway. The “Dog” was the Yellow Dog, a vernacular name for the Yazoo Delta. W.C. Handy composed his “Yellow Dog Rag” in 1914 which later became “The Yellow Dog Blues.” In February, 1923, Lizzie Miles cut what is probably the first recording of the Handy composition, by a blues singer, as “The Yellow Dog Blues.” It was to be another two years or more before Bessie Smith put her most famous version on wax. In 1927 Sam Collins cut “Yellow Dog Blues.”

One of the most famous songs was about the “Rock Island Line” (Rock Island and Pacific Railroad), heard on these shows by Lead Belly and Kelly Pace. In October 1934 John Lomax set up his recording equipment at Cummins State Prison in Little Rock, Arkansas and recorded a group led by Kelly Pace singing “Rock Island Line.” As Stephen Wade writes in The Beautiful Music All Around Us: “Rock Island Line’ begin its journey in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the repair shops of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Based on a traditional form and arising within a commercial setting, the song, like a trunk line whose branches radiate across the countryside, soon moved beyond this work site making new stops, shifting its contents, and streamlining its load. It migrated from a gospel quartet that the Arkansas prisoners performed to a rhythmic fable that Huddie Ledbetter created as he traveled with John Lomax as chauffeur, auto mechanic, and musical demonstrator. Eventually the song reached an incalculable number of players, singers, and listeners via skiffle, rock and roll, country, pop, and the folksong revival.”

Another famous railroad piece was Cow Cow Davenport’s “Cow Cow Blues.” Davenport’s early career revolved around carnivals and vaudeville. He toured TOBA with an act called Davenport and Company with blues singer Dora Carr and they recorded together in 1925 and 1926. Davenport didn’t cut a 78 record until 1927 although prior to that he made a number of piano rolls between 1925 and 1927 including three versions of “Cow Cow Blues.” The song was picked up guitarists and pianists alike. The “Cow Cow” in the title referred to a train’s cowcatcher, the device mounted at the front of a locomotive to deflect obstacles on the track that might otherwise damage or derail it or the train. We hear a guitar version by Charlie McCoy titled “That Lonesome Train That Took My Baby Away.”

The Santa Fe Southern Railway is mentioned in numerous blues songs and a whole school of pianists revolved around the railroad. As my friend and pianist expert Michael Hortig wrote: “”…The most powerful group of pianists working all around Texas but playing in a similar, technically outstanding style was the so-called ‘Santa Fe Group’. Pianists of that loose group came from Galveston, Houston, Richmond, Sugarland, and even up from the Piney Woods. When this group started to develop their style is not known, but Robert Shaw, who survived into the 1960s, was still able to play that complicated and complex style and dated it around 1920. He describes it: ‘It’s very peculiar and takes a lot of practice’. …They had a lot of peculiar tunes like ‘The Cows’, ‘Jim Nappy’, ‘Hattie Green’, ‘Black Girl’, ‘Put Me In The Alley’, but the most famous piece was a dance number, called The Ma Grinder’: ‘Whenever a new man would come looking for work, the bar keeper would tell him, let me hear you knock out the ‘Ma Grinder’. Once the most powerful and complex group in blues history, they dropped out of business when tastes of blues turn into a more modern sound at the end of the 30s.” Among those in this group were Bernice Edwards, Black Boy Shine, Conish ‘Pinetop’ Burks, Son Becky, Andy Boy, Rob Cooper and later, Robert Shaw and Bister Pickens.

Several songs like Bukka White’s ” Special Streamline” and Cripple Clarence Lofton’s “Streamline Train” refer to streamliners. A streamliner is any vehicle that incorporates streamlining to produce a shape that provides less resistance to air. The term is most often applied to certain high-speed railway trainsets of the 1930’s to 1950’s. For a short time in the late 1930s, the ten fastest trains in the world were all American streamliners. As White sings: “That’s that fast Special Streamline/Leavin’ outta Memphis, Tennessee/Goin’ into New Orleans/She runnin’ so fast, the hobos don’t fool with this train/They stand on the track with their hat in their hands.”

Among the famous railroad songs featured today are the ‘Midnight Special”, and the folk ballads Casey Jones, John Henry and Railroad Bill. Lyrics appearing in the “Midnight Special” were first recorded in print by Howard Odum in 1905. The song was first commercially recorded on the OKeh label in 1926 as “Pistol Pete’s Midnight Special” by Dave “Pistol Pete” Cutrell and the following year by bluesman Sam Collins. In 1934 Lead Belly recorded a version of the song at Angola Prison for John and Alan Lomax, who mistakenly attributed it to him as the author. Lead belly recorded at least three versions of the song, including the one we feature with the Golden Gate Quartet. The Midnight Special was the name of a passenger train formerly operated by the Chicago and Alton Railroad and its successor, the Gulf, Mobile and Ohio Railroad. The train departed Union Station in St. Louis, Missouri, at 11:30 p.m. nightly and arrived at Union Station in Chicago, Illinois, at 7 a.m. the following day.

John Luther “Casey” Jones was an American railroad engineer from Jackson, Tennessee who worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. On April 30, 1900, he alone was killed when his passenger train collided with a stalled freight train at Vaughan, Mississippi on a foggy and rainy night. His dramatic death trying to stop his train and save lives made him a folk hero who became immortalized in a popular song. We spin two versions on today’s program: “Kassie Jones, Pt. 1 & 2” by Furry Lewis and “Southern Casey Jones” by Jesse James.

John Henry is an American folk hero, notable for having raced against a steam powered hammer and won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand. He has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels. The truth about John Henry is obscured by time and myth, but one legend has it that he was a slave born in Missouri in the 1840s and fought his notable battle with the steam hammer along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Talcott, West Virginia. On today’s show we play a version by the duo The Two Poor Boys and “Spike Driver Blues”, Mississippi John Hurt’s take on the John Henry legend.

The legend of Railroad Bill arose in the winter of 1895, along the Louisville and Nashville (L&N) Railroad line in southern Alabama. Based loosely on the exploits of an African American outlaw known as “Railroad Bill,” tales of his brief but action-filled career on the wrong side of the law have been preserved in song, fiction, and theater. He has been variously portrayed as a “Robin Hood” character, a murderous criminal and a nameless victim of the Jim Crow South. He was never conclusively identified, but L&N detectives claimed he was a man named Morris Slater. Today we spin  “Railroad Bill” by Will Bennet.

We spin several songs about working on the railroad, hobos, hobo jungles and railroad police. Gandy dancer is a slang term used for early railroad workers in the United States and Canada, more formally referred to as section hands, who laid and maintained railroad tracks in the years before the work was done by machines. Texas Alexander evokes the experience in “Section Gang Blues” as does the T.C.I. Section Crew, a male vocal group, that recorded two titles for Paramount in 1927: “Track Linin” and “Section Gang Song.” Lead Belly also recorded “Linin’ Track.” “

A hobo jungle is a makeshift camp near a railroad where transient workers, train hoppers, and homeless individuals congregated. Several blues songs mention them in song. As Paul Garon wrote in What’s the Use of Walking if there’s a Freight Train Going Your Way? –  Black Hoboes & Their Songs: “The men like Big Joe Williams and David “Honeyboy” Edwards who knew every turning of every highway also knew every railroad that ran through their territory. They knew its routes, its stops, its mean cops and its mean or friendly brakemen. Treatment by the railroad police (bulls, dicks), as well as by the conductors and brakemen, was variable. At their worst, some bulls were ready to shoot hoboes on sight or at least beat them to the ground and send them to jail. Some dicks got 50 cents a head for any hobo captured, and this bounty was a great incentive. …Bulls treated the railroads as their property, and it was within their authority to throw hoboes off trains, but the more rabid bulls would often raid the hobo jungles—on land not belonging to the railroad—and destroy clothes, utensils and other personal belongings found there. …Railroad police were the sworn enemy of hoboes, and when they clashed, the hobo usually lost.” In this vein we play Sleepy John Estes’ “Special Agent (Railroad Police Blues)” and Memphis Minnie sings about the notorious railroad cop “Reachin’ Pete.” Sometimes the engineers were sympathetic and would let hobos ride while others are described in a line that shows up in numerous blues songs, although the origins are hazy; ““Mean old fireman, cruel old engineer.”

Pullman porters were men hired to work for the railroads as porters on sleeping cars. Starting shortly after the American Civil War, George Pullman sought out former slaves to work on his sleeper cars. Until the 1960s, Pullman porters in the United States were almost exclusively black and have been widely credited with contributing to the development of the black middle class. Sylvester Weaver uses the subject in his “Railroad Porter Blues.”

Even if they were unable to afford a ticket, men were often provided the opportunity to ride the rails or the blinds (the practice of riding between cars on a moving freight train, so as to be out of sight of the train crew or police). The freight train was a man’s escape, for he could hop from train to train to ride. A woman could not. In her famous “Freight Train Blues” of 1924, Trixie Smith sang “When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides /But when a man gets the blues, he catches a freight train and rides” While not as frequent a topic as the men, trains were sung by several female singers heard today including Bessie Smith “Dixie Flyer” (The Dixie Flyer from Chicago and St. Louis via Evansville, Nashville, and Atlanta to Florida) and “Chicago Bound”, Clara Smith “L&N Blues” (“I am a rambling woman I’ve got a rambling mind”), Maggie Jones “Box Car Blues”, Memphis Minnie “Chickasaw Train Blues”, “Cow Cow Blues” has a version with Doris Carr on vocals and of course the previously mentioned Lucille Bogan who has another fine song in “T & N O Blues” (Texas and New Orleans Railroad).