WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - The Timbrel and the Lyre: Railroads- The Working Men

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

In the first of two episodes on railroads, we explore the impact of railroads on the American working man—from the hoboes who rode the rods to Casey Jones and the brave engineers.

Hello everyone and welcome. I'm your host Gwen Thompson, and you're listening to The Timberl and the Liar on Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM. Today is the episode for all the railroad enthusiasts and nostalgists, because we're going to talk about trains. Riding trains, crashing trains, driving trains, robbing trains, dying on trains, building trains, hopping trains, even just watching trains, you can find it all written into song. Why? Well, think about the type of people who, in the era of the locomotive, see folk music is one of their main pastimes. They're working people, often in poverty or one step above, and they work long hours at grinding work.

Railroads encounter all those people and make a deep imprint on their lives that's hard for us to understand today. By 1890, one out of 44 working-age Americans worked on a railroad in some capacity, and in 1920, that number was one out of 28. That doesn't count the farmers who relied on railroads to transport their crops, or the hobos who rode trains from job to job. As we know, folk singers write about what's in their hands. Today, I want to use folk music to hammer in that impression. I want to show you the folk songs about working on and interacting with the railway

so that you can see how ubiquitous railroads were in the life of working people, a hundred or 150 years ago. Then we'll be ready to talk about the more mystical, symbolic significance of railways. Rhodes in the next episode. To do this, I want to start with hobos, and I want you to hear what Louis Lamor has to say on the subject. He was one for a while, so he ought to know. To properly understand the situation in America before the Depression, one must realize there was a great demand for seasonal labor, and much of this was supplied by men called hobos. Over the years, the terms applied to wanderers have been confused until all meaning has been lost. To begin with, bum was a local man who did not want to work. A tramp was a wanderer of the same kind,

but a hobo was a wandering worker and essential to the nation's economy. In the days before the big combines, it was the hobo who shocked the grain, picking up the bundles dropped by a binder, and stacking them to be picked up by men on hay racks. Many hobos would start working the harvest in Texas and follow the ripening grain north through Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska into the Dakotas. During harvest season, when the demand for farm labor was great, the freight trains permitted the hobos to ride, as the railroads were to ship the harvested grain and it was in their interest to see that labor was provided. Often this lot of wandering workers was mixed with college boys, earning enough money for school, or working to get in shape for football. Some simply drifted because they enjoyed the life, the work in the open fields, the variety of towns and experiences, and the chance to see the country. The Depression brought a different kind of drifter to the railroads and highways,

and only one who bridged that period can grasp the depth of the change. The Depression hobos had little of that carefree, cheerful attitude of the earlier hobo. They were serious, often frightened men. They had come from towns where work was no longer available and were, as we all were, seeking work. Often these men had families to whom they wrote when they could afford the postage. The criminal element in either segment was small indeed. The years before the Depression were the heyday of the hobo. His labor was much in demand, and he, loving to wander, rarely stayed long on a job. During the knockabout years, the hobo

acquired a literature of his own, stories, poetry, and songs, passed on by word of mouth, only occasionally printed or recorded. Among the songs best remembered, although there were hundreds now lost, were, Hallelujah, I'm a bum, the bum song, the dying hobo, big rock candy mountain, the hype song. Thus, a hobo is an itinerant worker. A bum or a tramp is a shirker, and men were very particular about the difference. That's why a song like this one is so insulting.

I don't love the recording, but it's the only one I could find. On Sunday morning, it began to rain. When around the bin came a passenger train. On the bumpers was a hobo john. He's a good old. Hobo but he's dead and gone. He's dead and gone.

He's dead and gone. He's a good old hobo, but he's dead and gone. Jagel's daughter said before she died, The father fixed the blind so the bums can't ride. If ride they must let them ride the rod. Let them put their trust in the hands, Now, I don't know what fixing the blinds means. I tried to find it, but I couldn't. But I presume it has something to do with locking up any open spaces or doors on the cars so no hobo can hop freight.

Riding the rods, on the other hand, refers to crawling under a train and clinging to any machinery or foothold there, that's underneath one of the cars. It's different from riding the rails, which just means traveling by rail in any capacity. Writing the rods was extremely dangerous, deafening and blinding. Think of all the sand kicked up. But men desperate for work would do it. Sometimes it was the only way to grab onto a train, or the only way to hide from a particularly keen railroad bowl, the fellow who kicked out the hoppers. The insult of the song is that Jay Gold's daughter, Gold was a very wealthy railroad magnate who died in 1892, doesn't know the difference between an honest hobo and a lazy bum, so she kills poor Hobo John by forcing him to ride the rods.

Now, you also heard Louis Lamour mention the Big Rock Candy Mountain. There are parodies innumerable all across the world, and I'm sure you've heard some of them, but let's hear an early version. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, you never change your socks, and the little streams of alcohol come a trickling down the rocks. The brakemen have to tip their hats, and the railroad bulls are blind. There's a lake of stew and a whiskey, too. As Lamar around them in a big canoe in the big rock candy mountains.

As Lamar describes, the culture of a hobo in the pre-depression days was cheerful. It was a good life, where you followed the good weather and the jobs were plenty. It was adventurous, even if tough, but they liked to sing songs like this one that portrayed the fun parts of it, the perfect freedom of traveling around as you liked, with few possessions to worry over, and hopefully a soft-hard woman to dole you out some stew wherever you jumped off next. But during the Great Depression, the mood changed. Jobs were scarce, and being a hobo didn't mean wanderlust. It meant being out of any other kind of stable job.

Men did it not to see the world or earn money for school, but to feed hungry families who stayed back alone, hoping Dad's money arrived soon and often enough to feed them. The hobos themselves rode far, often on slim chances of any work when they arrived, with the kind housewives fewer and further between than ever. And the only plentiful thing was the company of other. men down on their luck. Now, Johnny Cash may have been a commercial singer, but he knew and sang more folk music than most people give him credit for, and the stuff that he did write

was heavily folk inspired, and his family lived a lot of the experiences that are worked into our songs. So listen to this, the introduction to his song, Hobo Bill's Last Ride. My daddy was riding a great train, catching it at Ford Ice and riding down to Memphis or other points, where he might get a job cutting cordwood for 35 cents or maybe 50 cents a day. But any job that he found, he was thankful for. It was hard work, but it was honest. And it earned money to send back home to us kids.

My daddy was one of hundreds of thousands of men that led this kind of life during the bitter, hungry years of the Depression. He wasn't a bum and he didn't know anybody that was. They all had to work and if you didn't work, you didn't make it. Sometimes the pickings were mighty lean and times at times were almost unbearable. Some fell by the wayside along the tracks and the yard.

Some were beaten by the elements. Beating by the rain, the cold, and some just gave up out of desperation. My daddy rode the top of a freight car into Memphis, one cold, wet January night, and he had to be pulled from the bars where he lay nearly frozen. You know, this wasn't uncommon,

and a lot of men weren't quite as lucky as my dad, and they took their last. ride into eternity on some snowbound freight train. You hear the change, don't you? From a cheerful, happy-go-lucky, rambling man mood, to one of fear and hunger and cold? This is when freight trains start to be associated with the blues. You hear songs about lonesome whistles and trains you can't afford to ride,

either to get home or to get to the next job. Both those things are so close at hand, and yet so far from possibility without a nickel in your plane. pocket. For example, here's a widely covered blues called 900 miles. It might just be about being far from home, but I think it's about desperation. I will pawn you my wagon. I will pawn my teeth. I will pawn on you my watch and my chaise. And if this train runs me right, I'll be home. Saturday night Because I'm 900 miles from my home

And I hate to hear That lonesome whistleblow The singer is desperate He's 900 miles from home And willing to pawn anything he has Either to buy a ticket home Or to send money to his family, it's not clear. The only thing we do know clearly

is that the hobo lifestyle is not a cheerful or secure one anymore. Now I want to change gears and talk about a unique class of heroes, the railroad engineers. Particularly, I want to talk about the ones who died in wrecks, and particularly I want to introduce you to the most famous of them all, Casey Jones. Most train wreck ballads have a surprisingly similar story, no matter how much the factual accounts they're drawn from may differ. They also tend to share or swap tunes and stanzas freely with each other, which is interesting because it tells you that people who hear one of these

songs have heard most of them. In other words, people weren't listening to these songs because they wanted to know what happened to Casey Jones. They were listening to these songs because they wanted to know songs about railroads. And they got Charlie Snyder, Jimmy Jones, Casey Jones, the Somerset Road, the wreck on the C&O Road, the wreck of the six-wheel driver, the wreck of the old 97, and who knows how many others all mixed up. It might be interesting for you and me to go back and learn about what really happened to the Old 97, but not to our singers. They cared about the moral and the adventure of the story, which is why the songs all tell the same trite and oft-repeated tale.

Usually, it starts with a train behind schedule. That's the first recording ever made of the wreck of the old 97. The train's behind time, and punctuality was the measure of a good engineer. Adding to that, every engineer is assigned to a specific locomotive. He does inspections on her and makes sure she's in running shape every morning. He usually has a custom whistle fitted to her and learns quilling, or playing the whistle to give a distinctive sound that belongs to him alone. A six-year-old child who lived by the railroad tracks in 1901

could have told you which engineer was driving by the sound of the whistle. That's why the song says, this is not 38, this is Old 97. The engineer and the Old 97 have earned a reputation, for punctuality that is theirs alone, and will be lost if they don't make up at least an hour. Casey Jones's real name was John L. Jones, but there were far too many Johns and Joneses around when he joined the railroad, so he went by Casey, after his hometown of Casey, Kentucky. In a day when running out of water on a long stretch, and having to run for it on foot was common, Casey was known for being able to get more miles out of a drop of water than any of his fellow engineers. One of them

quipped, when Jones ran for water, he took his train right with him. He wasn't a rulebook type. He took risks, not outrageous ones, and he wasn't reckless, but he did believe in making up time by human means. He was adventurous, ambitious, and daring, and trusted in his own strength about as much as any young man. Making engineer was his life's goal, and he'd worked his way up the railroad business for years to get it. According to Casey's fireman, Sim Webb, the crew was scheduled for an overnight run on the fateful morning of April 30th, 1901. The train before theirs was late, which delayed their departure by over an hour. The night was rainy, foggy, and dark, and the road known for its tricky curves.

I want to let Sim himself tell you the rest of the story. After it passed, we backed out on the main line and began the last 27 miles of our trip. 15 miles south of Goodman is the little town of Vaughn, approach by an S-curve, which swings first to the right, then back to the left. Naturally, on this type of curve, the engineer and fireman of the steam locomotive cannot see the track ahead at the same time. As we entered the curve, I put in a fire and climbed up and looked out of the cab. window on my side, so that when we swam to the left, I could look ahead with the clear view of the siding and station. As we came out of the curve, there right ahead of us were the red rear markers of a train. Showing red meant that it was on the main line. At once I yelled to Casey,

oh my lord, here's something on the main line. He jumped to his feet. He jumped to his feet, looked diagonally across the top of the boiler, at the same time setting the air brakes in the emergency stop. He had to reach up to do it as the valve was located high on these engines. Jump, Sim jump, he shouted. I jumped across the deck, grabbed the handrail, slid down as far as I could go, then turned loose. Casey never had a chance. The engineer's seat on one side, and the long boiler which divided us, the cab on the other side, made escape practically impossible.

Hitting the ground knocked me unconscious. I woke up about 30 minutes later to hear voices say, here he is. When I was able to talk, I asked about the engineer, and they told me case it was killed. We had hit the caboose of the freight train, gone through it, a car of hay, a car of corn, and halfway through a car of lumber. All of them on the main line. The rest of the train on the siding. We had no orders against this train or any other except number two, which we had already passed. Our clearance card gave us rights over everything, and we didn't have to look out for anybody.

If a train is blocking the main line, railroad road. rules require that a flagman must go out ten telegraph poles distance and place two warning torpedoes, two rail links apart, then a stop torpedo. If a train approaches, he must also light a red fusee. This flagman must remain out until called in. Without warning, we plowed into that caboose. The wreck occurred at 352 a.m. And as we had only two 12 miles to go, with a clear track we probably would have arrived at Cannon safely on time. They could not have known that there was a broken-down train stopped ahead of them, and Sim reports that they frequently topped speeds of 90 miles an hour that night,

in a locomotive that weighed about 75 tons. By staying with the train to hold down the break, Casey slowed the train to about 40 miles an hour by the time of the collision, and almost certainly saved many passengers' lives. Dead on the rail was a passenger train, blood was a boiling in Casey's brain. Casey said, hey, what kind of head, Sam, jump, Sam, jump, off. Oh, he did. Well, a hand on a whistle and a hand on a break.

North Mississippi was wide awake. I see railroad officials said he's a good engineer to be a laying dead. Casey Jones Climbed in the cabin Casey Jones Orders in his hand Casey Jones Leaning out the window

Taking a trip to the promised man Casey was found With an iron bolt driven through his neck Supposedly still clutching the brake Legend has it That corn grown from the kernels scattered in the wreck Still grows in a patch by the track

As a tribute to his sacrifice Unfortunately The railroad officials in real life were not as kind as those in the song. They later insisted that they had indeed set out a flag to warn Casey of the train ahead, but that he didn't see it. The Grateful Dead version of the song,

which has Casey high on cocaine, is totally without basis in any facts or legend I have found. Casey was known as an upright citizen and had already had one incident of heroism. A few years before this wreck, he had climbed onto the cowcatcher of his moving train to sweep a child paralyzed with fright off the tracks before she was killed.

It is more likely that either the officials lied to save their necks or that the fog simply obscured the cruise vision. Sim Webb spent much of his life proclaiming far and wide that Casey had died a hero. Most of the other railroad ballads go like that in some fashion. The brave engineer tries to make up time, which in the song is a mighty important cause. The train leaves the rails or otherwise crashes, but the engineer stays with his engine. It is the steam age equivalent of going down with the ship. the only honorable way to die.

We don't know precisely who wrote the ballot of Casey Jones. One story has it that Wallace Saunders, a man who worked in the Canton Roundhouse Casey was based from, wrote it as a tribute to his friend. Another Canton Roundhouse worker Cornelius Steen also claims the song. Here's his record. On a Sunday morning, it begins the rain round the curvy, spider-patting the scene,

told his farmer he'd better jump for the two local motors is bound to bump for they're going to bump for the song that's what that's this song this song was sung by cornelius saunders he heard the cornelius steen he heard the song sung as jimmy jones in canada city when he was a young man and he came back to Canton and worked in the Roundhouse there. Wallace Sanders heard the song, Jimmy Jones, as he sung it, and added a great many verses. After that, when Casey Jones got killed in a wreck on the IC line between Memphis and Canton, Sanders reversed the tune,

reverse the verses and change the words from Jimmy Jones to Casey Jones. And that's the way Casey Jones got started. Today there are books and museums dedicated to Casey, and he's one of the most beloved figures of American folklore. Like John Henry, he proved that a machine can't conquer a man's work or heart. In an era when the working class worried that industrialization would rob them of their work and their significance, Casey conquered the fearsome iron horse and made out of it a story of ordinary, human American heroism.

Next week we'll be talking about the mythological significance of railroads themselves. So, tune in if you want to know why a railroad is like Apollo's Sun-chariot. I'm Gwen Thompson. This is The Timberl and the Liar, and thank you for listening to Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM.