Railroad Songs

[Jimklag]

I thought a thread dedicated to period railroad songs would be fun. This will be the place where everyone can post his/her favorite period songs about the railroads. Here is The Great Locomotive Chase by Robert W. Smith.

 

[JOHN42768]

"The Ballad of Casey Jones" by Burl Ives come to mind

 

[Jimklag]

"The Ballad of Casey Jones" by Burl Ives come to mind

Don't have Burl Ives, but here is Johnny Cash.

 

[Pat Young]

One of the earliest of such songs is varioudly called Paddy Works on the Railway, Paddy Upon the Railway, Fiddle Me Ay, etc. Believed to have been sung in the 1850s, it first appeared in print in 1864. Like many Irish immigrant songs it mixes humor with death. Also like many such songs, it migrated across the Atlantic and was sung by Irish workers in the U.K.

 

[Jimklag]

One of the earliest of such songs is varioudly called Paddy Works on the Railway, Paddy Upon the Railway, Fiddle Me Ay, etc. Believed to have been sung in the 1850s, it first appeared in print in 1864. Like many Irish immigrant songs it mixes humor with death. Also like many such songs, it migrated across the Atlantic and was sung by Irish workers in the U.K.

Good one.

 

[Pat Young]

Next is the Irish immigrant song Drill Ye Tarriers Drill. This song was not published until the 1880s but it is believed to be based on an earlier folk song. This recording was made in 1902 on an Edison Cylinder and is itself historical. You can get a sense of how an Irish music hall singer might perform it. As with other Irish songs, it mixes humor with death and offers a biting critique of the exploitation of labor.

 

[donna]

Just love railroad songs. Two favorites are "I Been Working On The Railroad" and "The Wabash Cannonball".

I remember Pete Seeger did "Working on the Railroad" and the Carter family did "The Wabash Cannonball". Have to look those tunes up. I know several artist recorded those at various times.

 

[Jimklag]

Just love railroad songs. Two favorites are "I Been Working On The Railroad" and "The Wabash Cannonball".

I remember Pete Seeger did "Working on the Railroad" and the Carter family did "The Wabash Cannonball". Have to look those tunes up. I know several artist recorded those at various times.

Here you go, Donna.

 

[AUG]

I believe its postwar song, but John Henry is a classic. One of my favorite banjo players, Clifton Hicks plays a great version.

 

[Pat Young]

I believe its postwar song, but John Henry is a classic. One of my favorite banjo players, Clifton Hicks plays a great version.

John Henry is from the Reconstruction Era and entirely appropriate for CWT. There are several stories about him. This is the latest scholarly version as retold by Wiki:

In the 2006 book Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend, Scott Reynolds Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William & Mary, contends that the John Henry of the ballad was based on a different real person, the 20-year-old New Jersey-born African-American freeman, John William Henry. Nelson speculates that Henry, like many African Americans might have come to Virginia to work on the clean-up of the battlefields after the Civil War. Arrested and tried for burglary, he was among the many convicts released by the warden to work as leased labor on the C&O Railway.[5]:39

According to Nelson, conditions at the Virginia prison were so terrible that the warden, an idealistic Quaker from Maine, believed the prisoners, many of whom had been arrested on trivial charges, would be better clothed and fed if they were released as laborers to private contractors. (He subsequently changed his mind about this and became an opponent of the convict labor system.) Nelson asserts that a steam drill race at the Big Bend Tunnel would have been impossible because railroad records do not indicate a steam drill being used there.[6]

Instead, Nelson argues that the contest must have taken place 40 miles away at the Lewis Tunnel, between Talcott and Millboro, Virginia, where records indicate that prisoners did indeed work beside steam drills night and day.[7] Nelson also argues that the verses of the ballad about John Henry being buried near "the white house", "in sand", somewhere that locomotives roar, mean that Henry's body was buried in the cemetery behind the main building of the Virginia State Penitentiary, which photos from that time indicate was painted white, and where numerous unmarked graves have been found.[8]

Prison records for John William Henry stopped in 1873, suggesting that he was kept on the record books until it was clear that he was not coming back and had died. The evidence assembled by Nelson, though suggestive, is circumstantial; Nelson stresses that John Henry would have been representative of the many hundreds of convict laborers who were killed in unknown circumstances tunneling through the mountains or who died shortly afterwards of silicosis from dust created by the drills and blasting.

 

[Jimklag]

Here is an instrumental - Jenny On The Railroad

 

[AndyHall]

This song, the "Wreck of the Old 97," tells the story of a rail crash in Danville, Virginia in 1903, when a Southern Railway fast mail train went off a high trestle. The Civil War connection is that, um, uh, well, the crash site is about a mile from the Sutherlin Mansion where Jeff Davis camped out for a week or so in April 1865 when he was on the run from the Yankees. So sue me.

The "Fast Mail," as it was known, carried mail and express baggage from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. This particular leg of the trip was to end at Spencer, North Carolina, but the train was running very late, having been delayed in starting from Washington waiting on forwarded mails from Boston and New York. Engineer Steve Broady, driving Southern Railway No. 1102, was trying to make up time.

There was a long, steady downward grade approaching Danville, but at the end where the line met the Dan River, it made a sharp left turn on the trestle to run parallel to the river. The posted speed on the trestle was 5 mph, but the Fast Mail was going much, much over that -- between 30 and 50 mph, according to witnesses. The locomotive and the four baggage and express mail cars went off the trestle, onto the river bank 45 feet below. Eleven were killed, including Broady, seven injured, and several survived by jumping from the train before the crash. All aboard the train were railroad or post office employees.

Accidents of that sort were sadly common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the Danville wreck was immortalized in the song, "Wreck of the Old 97," that became a big hit for Vernon Dalhart in 1924. His version was, reportedly, the first country song to sell over a million copies. It's been covered by many artists since, including Woodie Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Pink Anderson, Boxcar Willie, Hank Snow, Bobby Osborne and others. Here's a Dutch group, Def Americans, doing a worthy effort in tribute to Johnny Cash's recording.

 

[Pat Young]

View attachment 164404

This song, the "Wreck of the Old 97," tells the story of a rail crash in Danville, Virginia in 1903, when a Southern Railway fast mail train went off a high trestle. The Civil War connection is that, um, uh, well, the crash site is about a mile from the Sutherlin Mansion where Jeff Davis camped out for a week or so in April 1865 when he was on the run from the Yankees. So sue me.

The "Fast Mail," as it was known, carried mail and express baggage from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. This particular leg of the trip was to end at Spencer, North Carolina, but the train was running very late, having been delayed in starting from Washington waiting on forwarded mails from Boston and New York. Engineer Steve Broady, driving Southern Railway No. 1102, was trying to make up time.

There was a long, steady downward grade approaching Danville, but at the end where the line met the Dan River, it made a sharp left turn on the trestle to run parallel to the river. The posted speed on the trestle was 5 mph, but the Fast Mail was going much, much over that -- between 30 and 50 mph, according to witnesses. The locomotive and the four baggage and express mail cars went off the trestle, onto the river bank 45 feet below. Eleven were killed, including Broady, seven injured, and several survived by jumping from the train before the crash. All aboard the train were railroad or post office employees.

Accidents of that sort were sadly common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the Danville wreck was immortalized in the song, "Wreck of the Old 97," that became a big hit for Vernon Dalhart in 1924. His version was, reportedly, the first country song to sell over a million copies. It's been covered by many artists since, including Woodie Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Pink Anderson, Boxcar Willie, Hank Snow, Bobby Osborne and others. Here's a Dutch group, Def Americans, doing a worthy effort in tribute to Johnny Cash's recording.

We visited the site of the wreck years ago on the line from Lynchburg to Danville. Stopped in at Spencer too.

 

[Waterloo50]

Eight Irish Workers (Irish Railroad Song) www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfTMR91OA4M