Yet another I got from Joe Ely, penned by Butch Hancock. I’ve paid tribute to that pairing a few times already, in my posts for “West Texas Waltz,” “Row of Dominoes,” and “Wishing for You,” and don’t have more to say about them… Joe reshaped my ideas about what I liked and wanted to do musically, Butch supplied a bunch of the best songs in Joe’s repertoire, and I learned a bunch of them, though I only performed a couple onstage.

This is one of the ones I didn’t perform, because I kept hearing Joe’s band in my head and couldn’t figure out how to get that sound with one acoustic guitar… but a few weeks ago I gave it another shot and I’m pretty happy with it. The bassline is key, because it gives the song that rolling train feel, and it occurred to me that if I shifted to drop-D tuning, it would fall neatly under my fingers.

In the early years of my friendship with Peter Guralnick, I mentioned my passion for Joe — who he liked, though less passionately — and he told me that he’d tried to get Sleepy LaBeef to do this one, but Sleepy was a serious churchgoing Christian and couldn’t see himself singing the third verse. To me, that verse seems the opposite of blasphemous, but in any case I love this one for the train feeling rather than the philosophizing.

I was never a full-on train guy, but I read Bound for Glory as a kid and did one trip across the West on freights, and a couple of years later got kicked off a boxcar I hopped out of Minneapolis… some of which I’ve written about in my posts on “Danville Girl” and “Vigilante Man”. I haven’t hopped a freight in many years and don’t expect to try it again, but I still enjoy watching them roll past, and keep an eye out for cars that might be good to ride.