Trains

[ladyofastolat]

We have a double CD that contains over 60 original recordings from the 50s British skiffle explosion. "Why are they all about trains?" I asked when I first listened to it. Many months later, Pellinor came in when I had one of the CDs in. "What are you listen-- Oh, it's about a train: it must be skiffle." Closer listening reveals that are not all about trains, but a surprisingly large number are. If they're not about real trains, they're about metaphorical ones, and if they're not about metaphorical ones, they're about bandits who rob trains. Even some songs that I'd originally assumed were about miners (e.g. John Henry; Drill, ye tarriers, drill) turn out to be about people building railroads.

Why this obsession with trains? Since most of the skiffle repertoire consists of American folk or blues songs, why do trains crop up so much in these? Is it because America is so much bigger than Britain, so the coming of the railroads had a much bigger impact, worthy of being immortalised in song? Is it because a new and expanding country wanted folk songs that reflected their own daily life, rather than old imported songs centred in rural British life? (British folk songs definitely found their way to America. Loads of traditional British ballads were collected by folklorists in the Appalachians, for example.)

And why so few trains in the British folk song repertoire? I've been idly thinking all day, and I can't come up with a single one. I've come up with one about road building and one about canal building. I've come up with various songs about highway robbery, but none about train robbery. There are loads of songs about sea travel, and a goodly amount about shipwrecks, but where are the songs about railway travel or awful Victorian rail disasters?

Or are there hundreds of British train-related folk songs that will cause me to go, "Of course! How could I have forgotten that?" when people point them out?

Comments

[emily-shore.livejournal.com]

...but where are the songs about railway travel or awful Victorian rail disasters?

I had a friend as an undergraduate who claimed that all British folk songs were about the Tay Bridge disaster. I think she might not have been entirely serious but she was very earnest about it. :)

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Coincidentally, I was just thinking earlier today that I didn't know any folk songs about the Tay Bridge Disaster - and that no folk song could be half as good as the McGonagall poem, anyway. :-)

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I've got a version of John Henry in which he's an accountant, not a railroad worker. I also have Rolf Harris's more conventional version.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

How does John Henry the accountant die, then? "I'll die with a ledger in my hand"?

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Pencil.

And calculator replaces steam drill.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

I would suspect that it is to do with factors such as but not limited to the importance of trains in an enormous country where just starting to walk was not such a practical option as in a small country with lots of villages (I believe it takes 3 days for a train to cross the contiguous states), the numbers of people who must have been involved in their construction (similar to the numbers of sailors in this country), the economic importance of the railroads such that towns engaged in skulduggery and bribing to get them routed in a favourable direction (which is why Clinton is the county seat of De Witt County, Illinois and Farmer City is not), and the sheer numbers of people taking trains during the Great Depression in hopes of a better future elsewhere.

[gramarye1971]

*concurs* From about 1850 to 1950, railway employment (as a builder, train operator, steward, or other job) was one of the few semi-stable and transferrable jobs that existed across the entire country, and as such it attracted huge amounts of unskilled and semi-skilled labour. This was especially the case for black men who found it hard to find employment outside the most menial jobs -- IIRC, Maya Angelou's autobiography mentions that her older brother, who worked for the Southern Pacific line as a porter, wanted to quit his job but was admonished, 'Keep sleeping with old lady Southern Pacific, or start sleeping on the streets.' So there was always a love-hate relationship with the railroads that comes out in a lot of blues and folk music, and slipped into skiffle from there.

Plus, in the Great Depression period, where countless unemployed men rode the rails from town to town in search of work, the whole hobo lifestyle developed a strange sort of romance -- like that of the highwaymen in British folk music.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. I did American history for A-level, but I really know very little about it - and have probably forgotten most of what I knew, and, besides, it was more political than social or cultural, anyway. I feel inspired to seek out a book on the role of the railroad in American history.

[gramarye1971]

For a sample, I've heard decent things about Richard Orsi's Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850-1930. It's more of a corporate and social history than anything else, and less about trainspotter-y things like rolling stock. ^_^

[sally_maria]

It isn't just about America, but I really enjoyed Blood, Gold and Iron - How the railways transformed the world, by Christian Wolmar. It's a very readable account of the building of railways all over the world and how they helped to create the modern world economy.

(It's a sequel to Fire and Steam, by the same author, which is about British railways, and is equally good. The author obviously loves railways, but not in a blind way, and it's not train-spotterish at all.)

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec. It's currently on the shelf in one of our libraries, too, which is even batter. :-)

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

That does all make sense. I'm sure that railways made a big difference to British people, but it can't have been anything like the difference that railroads made in America.

One thing that's just occurred to me is that America seemed to go on producing folk songs for much longer than Britain did, and singing them as a living tradition. When Cecil Sharp and co. went collecting in England, he had to collect from people in the 70s, many of whom lamented that the younger generation had no interest in "the old songs." However, there seem to be loads of American folk songs about early twentieth century life. Which probably isn't relevant to anything you said, but, hey...

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Is part of the reason that Country is pretty close to Folk in some respects? (So America has for decades had a commercially mainstream musical form that could fund crossover acts?)

[phoebesmum.livejournal.com]

Depending on your definition of folk, there's Ewan MacColl's first radio ballad, The Ballad of John Axon.

The comments above have pretty comprehensively covered the reasons for the prevalence of the train motif in traditional American music - a theme which still continues, Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen have both written a number of songs about trains.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

It's hard to imagine modern British songwriters waxing lyrical about the 7.34 South-West Trains service to London Waterloo in quite the same way. Though I suppose there are nostalgic songs about departed trains - e.g. Flanders and Swan's The Slow Train. And there's always Les Barker's Plains of Waterloo pastiche, "The Trains of Waterloo"...

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Not quite a song as such, but there is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmciuKsBOi0

[bunn.livejournal.com]

The Divine Comedy did a song: 'National Express', which I rather like, though that's about the coach company rather than trains.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

Google found this page, which might be of interest:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/railways_in_music.htm

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Thanks! No time tonight because of dancing practice, but I'll take a look tomorrow.

[segh.livejournal.com]

"Poor Paddy works on the railway" - if you count Irish.

[louis-soul.livejournal.com]

Trains used to have a lot more symbolism,I was reading somewhere that they used to be symbolic of sex, train travel still has a lot of romance associated with it, mystery, happieness and sorrow.