This was the lead song on one of my favorite Pete Seeger albums, 3 Saints, 4 Sinners and 6 Other People — though when I recorded the video I misremembered it as being on Favorite American Folksongs. I also remembered the parenthetic note “yodel learned from the Sons of the Pioneers” as being attached to this title, though it was actually how he labeled the same yodel on his recording of “The Goofing-Off Suite.” Such are the vicissitudes of memory.

In any case, I always liked this one, and tried for many years to do the yodel at least competently, but failed… so I never performed it, because the yodel is kind of basic to the arrangement. But, damn it, I like the song, so I picked it up again for this project and decided to play the yodel sections as instrumental breaks — not a perfect solution, but better than dropping the song completely.

The rest of my spoken introduction is accurate: When I was learning songs from Pete’s records, I had no idea who the Sons of the Pioneers were, and when I first heard them I didn’t appreciate them. I liked Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston (who apparently taught this song to Pete), and their Hollywood cowboy sound was too slick for my taste. (My film tastes were similar, since I had grown up in the later era of westerns, when cowboys no longer harmonized between gunfights.) I still don’t have any of their records and can’t think of a mood when I’d toss one on if I had it, but they harmonized beautifully and Bob Nolan, who formed the group with Tim Spencer and Leonard Slye, wrote some classic western-pop songs, including “Tumbling Tumbleweeds,” “Cool Water,” and this one. Plus, I just found out that he spent his middle school years in Boston, en route from his Canadian birthplace to high school in Tucson.

There are a couple of nice videos online of Pete singing this, including one where he and Arlo Guthrie do harmony yodeling, and I still really like the way he does it.  But if you want to go back to the roots, here’s a clip of the Sons themselves doing the yodel and a couple of verses  in one of their earliest films, just before Leonard Slye left the group to make a solo career as Roy Rogers:

Another from the IWW’s red songbook, written by Joe Hill to the tune of the pop song “Casey Jones” — except, like a lot of people on the folk scene, I heard the union parody before hearing the original song, and I still don’t think  I’ve heard the pop song all the way through. Like most people, I got this from Pete Seeger, who I assume got it from the songbook, which was a model for him and the Almanac Singers when they began writing union songs.

It was one of Hill’s first songs to be published, in 1911 or so, and he wrote it for a strike on the Southern Pacific Railroad, though there’s apparently some question about exactly which strike. In his book on Joe Hill, Gibbs Smith says it was almost certainly written for a strike of 35,000 shopmen on the Illinois Central and Harriman lines, the latter including the SP, which lasted from 1911 through 1915.

Smith writes that trains kept running because the train operators — engineers, firemen, and brakemen — belonged to a company union and refused to join the strike, which is the theme of the lyric. He also writes that several trains exploded during that period due to poor maintenance by inexperienced strikebreakers, and quotes a union bulletin on that subject:

Engine 4037 exploded on the Southern Pacific Railroad. Miscellaneous repairs had been made on it by the strikebreakers (scabs) who are employed by this company — an aggregation of moral germs who know no more about a locomotive and its requirements than the cave dwellers knew about the higher principles of mathematics… The engine had been in for repairs. A number of staybolts had been applied, and the engine turned out of the shops without any of these staybolts being riveted. The crew riding in the engine was killed by the explosion.

Once again, an old song that remains all too applicable in the present. The union-busting of the last forty years has brought us back damn near to Joe Hill’s situation — and much as I appreciate some of the rhetoric I’m hearing in the current election cycle, “income inequality” is not going to be seriously addressed from the top down by politicians, unless there is a hell of a lot of pressure on them from the people at the bottom of that equation, which means organizing, which means unions.

Yet another I got from Cisco Houston, written to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me” by T-Bone Slim, one of the most popular I.W.W. songwriters, and published in the “Little Red Songbook” around 1920.

Like everyone on the folk scene, I grew up with romantic legends of the “wobblies,” and at some point in the 1980s I even signed up and paid my dues for a while. I think it was Utah Phillips who signed me up — he stayed with me pretty often when he was in Boston, and I stayed with him in Spokane, and he was an outspoken advocate for the O.B.U. (One Big Union). A few years later, I had developed a more cynical view and one evening I was over at Dave Van Ronk’s apartment, and we were well into the Irish whiskey, and I made a slighting remark about lost-cause romanticism in general, and Phillips and the Wobblies in particular. Dave hove himself up from his place on the couch, stomped into his bedroom, stomped back, and slapped his I.W.W. dues book on the coffee table. (I immediately checked to see if he was paid up, and of course he wasn’t, but he considered that the mark of a true wobbly, and he was probably right.)

The Wobblies were strongest in the western logging and mining states, so I’d always assumed T-Bone Slim was from that part of the country, but it turns out he was a Hudson River barge captain. Apparently his name was Matt Velentine Huhta and he was a Finnish immigrant, or at least from a Finnish immigrant family, but that’s about all anyone knows. As his 1942 obituary in The Industrial Worker put it, “Having lived almost a full life of anonymity, Fellow Worker Huhta died that way and was buried that way. We have an idea that’s the way he wanted it to be.”

Like his more famous predecessor, Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim wrote his songs to familiar tunes, the idea being that people who couldn’t read music would be able to pick up a songbook or lyric sheet and already know the melody. It wasn’t just the Wobblies who did that — songwriters of all kinds, including writers of Christian hymns, regularly set new lyrics to old tunes, and in those days no one took them to court for copyright violation.

“The Girl I Left Behind Me” is a popular song and fiddle tune that goes back at least to the 18th century and has been found through much of the English-speaking world. It seems better suited to fiddling than singing, since the notes tumble after one another so quickly that there’s no space to breathe, but it was clearly a favorite of amateur singers — the evidence being eight pages of filthy parodies in Vance Randolph’s collection of bawdy Ozark folklore. (I would print some here, but better to send you all to the library — there are many happy hours to be spent in Randolph’s pages.)

Like pretty much everybody, I got this from Jean Ritchie. I never actually had any Jean Ritchie albums — I don’t know why, since I liked her singing, but that’s how it was — but this was on a four-LP anthology called The Folk Box. I must have got that set fairly early, because I can’t remember not having it, and I have very clear memories of working my way through the accompanying booklet, which had photographs of all the musicians and lyrics to all the songs. It had Dave Van Ronk singing “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” which I knew at one point, and when I look through the titles most of them are familiar, but this is the only song I remember well enough to perform.

Given the eerie lyric, I was charmed when I began investigating and the first evidence I could find of this song was from a book published in 1911 by the Transylvania Printing Company — but, sadly, that turned out to just be the press of Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Further investigation — with thanks to the Mudcat discussion group — turned up a broadside titled “The Old Gray Mare” in the Library of Congress, which has a very similar lyric performed by a comedian named W.B. Cavanagh at Barnum’s Museum. Slightly more investigation revealed that Cavanagh was a professional stage Irishman and minstrel, author of plays and folios including Jennie Angel’s Shamrock Songster (1867) and “the laughable farce…entitled Jim Crowe, Alive Again” (1869). And that’s as far back as I’ve been able to trace it.

I find numerous sources that suggest one could trace “Nottamun Town” much further and farther, to the British Isles, some giving regions and dates for its possible origin, and many suggesting it is a survival of old mummers’ rituals. But none seem to include any solid evidence of its existence there before it was reintroduced by Ritchie (or, for the more scholarly, by Cecil Sharp’s Folksongs of the Southern Appalachians — which at first glance seems an earlier source, since he published in 1932, but he collected the song from Jean’s sister and cousin, so the Ritchie women still seem to have a good claim), and all the British versions I’ve seen are clearly descended from hers.  If someone out there finds a pre-Ritchie British version of a substantially similar song — not just a nonsense song with a few overlapping lines, but something at least as close as “The Old Gray Mare” — please let me know.

I got this from Jack Elliott, yet again, and he presumably got it from the Monroe Brothers — he did it slower, but had Ralph Rinzler playing mandolin to get something like to the Monroe Brothers sound. In those days, I had never heard of the Monroe Brothers, or even of Bill Monroe. I’m not sure I even knew what bluegrass was.

Many years later, I’ve heard a lot of Bill Monroe records, but I don’t know any I like better than the ones he did at the beginning of his career with his brother Charlie playing guitar and singing harmony. (Actually, I guess Charlie sang lead and Bill sang high tenor, as in his bluegrass bands.)

I used to play this song a lot — along with “Katy Cline,” which I got from the Greenbriar Boys (of whom more will be said in later posts), it was what I’d pull out at bluegrass jams, and I also played it fairly often at bar gigs. It was upbeat and energetic, and gave me a chance to do some Woody-style flatpicking. Then at some point in the late 1980s I stopped using a flatpick and decided to come up with a way to play it with my fingers, and worked out a fancy fingerstyle arrangement… and somehow, it just wasn’t the same.

So I didn’t play it for a couple of decades or more, and then I got to doing this project and tried it out, using my fingers, because I don’t use a flatpick anymore. And it wasn’t working, so I dug out a flatpick, and damn… it’s still fun. I also dug out a harmonica, since I used to play harmonica breaks on this one, and that’s still fun, too.

This is one of Woody’s less familiar songs — at least, I’ve never heard anyone else sing it — but I always thought it was one of his most powerful, because it’s so simple. Like “Vigilante Man,” it’s just a string of questions, a decent man asking what this thing is, and why.

I also like the rhythm, rhyme, and reason of “who says who’s going to the calaboose…” I’ve just been reading a life of Eugene V. Debs and thinking a lot about that question, and Woody and Debs have about the same answer, which is that it’s the rich and powerful, defending the property they and their ancestors stole from everybody else.

I know a lot of people think that answer is simplistic, but money seems to be talking louder today than ever in my lifetime, and the prisons are fuller, and more people are killing more other people… and money managers and  war profiteers are doing very nicely, and as I’ve written before, I wish Woody’s songs weren’t still so damn timely.

After hopping a freight in Davis, California, and riding it to Portland, Oregon, I headed east. The next ride was on a flatcar to Pasco, Washington, then on the front of a grain car to Spokane. In Spokane, I met a young guy from Wisconsin and we decided to ride together through Montana. We wanted to catch the High Line through Glacier Park, and he walked over to the office to see if he could find out when it would be leaving. Meanwhile, I was sitting out in the middle of the yards, with no one visible in any direction, so I sat down on the ground and began singing all the train songs I knew.

It was a long wait, and eventually I got to “Vigilante Man,” which isn’t exactly a train song, but on the way out of Portland I’d been warned not to stop at Wishram, because gangs of vigilantes were beating up hobos to keep them from hanging around the town. I hadn’t realized that Woody’s world was still quite that alive…

Anyway, there I was playing in the middle of this freight yard, and there was no one anyone near me. So I’m singing, “What is a vigilante man? Tell me, what is a vigilante man…”

And suddenly the voice of god booms out, right next to me: “WELL, DYLAN, IF YOU REALLY WANT TO KNOW, WE CAN SEND A COUPLE OUT TO YOU!”

Turns out there was a sort of amplifier system on the yards, so the guys back at the switching house (or whatever it’s called) could communicate with the guys making up the trains, and they could hear me, and I could hear them. Definitely could hear them.

When I learned this song as a kid, I didn’t even know what a vigilante was, and when I found out, I still thought I was singing about the past, the days of Tom Joad and Preacher Casey. That was back before Bernard Goetz and George Zimmerman. I wish some of Woody’s songs would go out of date, but unfortunately they still sound like he’s been reading the latest news.

Another I got from Cisco Houston — I still picture the photo that illustrated this song in his songbook.

When I learned it, I was a bit perplexed because the singer was standing on a train platform, smoking a cigar and asking the railroad man about train times — that is, acting like a passenger — though he was waiting to hop a freight. In Bound for Glory, the railroad men tended to be hostile, so this made no sense to me.

Then I went to hop a freight for the first time, out of Davis, California. As it happened, Bodie Wagner was living there, and I got his phone number from Utah Phillips and stopped by to ask for advice and play a few songs before catching out. Bodie was clearly a bit nonplussed at this kid showing up on his doorstep, but we sat around the backyard for a couple of hours, and then he gave me a lift to the freight yards and pointed out the dispatcher’s office.

I went in and asked when the next freight would be heading north. The dispatcher said, “I hope you’re not planning to try to ride a freight train — people get killed that way, you know. I sometimes see guys waiting near those trees, just past that house there, and I just hope they aren’t going to do something stupid. So when that train comes through at seven-thirty, you just keep away from there, ’cause I wouldn’t want you to get hurt.”

Armed with that information, I sat by the trees, playing guitar, till the train came through a bit after 7:30. It didn’t have many cars fit for riding, but I was inexperienced (bordering on stupid) and eager to ride, so I climbed on a piggyback — a flatcar with a couple of semi truck trailers on it– which more experienced freight riders consider too dangerous for riding, because if there’s an accident the trailer can tip and crush you.

Nothing like that happened, of course. I just lay under the trailers through the night, sleeping a little, listening to the wheels, seeing occasional lights in the distance, and at dawn the sun rose behind Mount Shasta, and it was the prettiest view I’ve ever seen.

I’m not sure what the moral of that story is, except that you can find a lot of worse guides than Woody and Cisco.

Once again, I got this from Cisco Houston, but its history is marvelously convoluted. The source for everyone in the folk revival, sort of, more or less, was Paul Clayton — a name that was all but forgotten a few years ago, but now is having a mild revival thanks to a biography and play based on his life. I happened on Clayton even before Cisco Houston, thanks to someone giving me an album called Whaling and Sailing Songs from the Days of Moby Dick. I learned most of the songs on that album and sang them ad infinitum, when I was maybe seven years old, but don’t recall any of them completely, which may be for the best.

Dave Van Ronk always claimed that Paul’s motto was “If you can’t write, rewrite; if you can’t rewrite, copyright.” If so, the irony is inescapable, since he is most famous today for rewriting an old folksong as “Who’ll Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone),” which Bob Dylan rewrote in turn, ending up with “Don’t think Twice, It’s All Right.” There was apparently at least the germ of a lawsuit; there was also an apparently intimate friendship. But that’s another story.

Getting back to “Travel On,” Clayton apparently picked up a couple of lines from a folksong pamphlet and reworked them into the chorus, which he sang for a lawyer/folksinger in Chicago named Larry Ehrlich, who sang it at a party for Pete Seeger, and Seeger liked it and suggested that they write some verses, so he and Ehrlich and a guy named David Lazar made these up on the spot.

Pete then recorded the song at his final studio session with the Weavers, which was one of the great weird anomalies of the folk revival. It was January 1958, and Jimmie Rodgers (the rock ‘n’ roller, not the yodeling brakeman or the Chicago bluesman) had just had a hit with an electrified version of the Weavers’ “Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” so Vanguard Records rushed them into the studio to capitalize on that baby by cutting a rock ‘n’ roll record. They recorded a half-dozen songs, backed by Pete’s banjo, a chromatic harmonica, and two electric guitars. This was one of them, and it is a bizarre experience to hear Pete’s lead vocal punctuated by twangy rockabilly licks. Indeed, it was too bizarre for most record buyers, but a country singer named Billy Grammer jumped on the record, redid it, and got a top ten hit.

None of which I knew until a couple of years ago, when I was working on Dylan Goes Electric! and the redoubtable Dave Samuelson got me copies of the electric Weavers tracks. I just thought it was an old folk song that Cisco sang, and that’s still how I think of it, when not in historian mode.

I was wandering around Harvard Square, shortly after I began wandering by myself, and there was a thin, bearded man standing in a doorway near Woolworth’s, playing an autoharp and singing “East Virginia.” I knew I had it on a record, though I couldn’t remember which, but in those days I didn’t have many records, so I went home and dug through them and found it on my one Ramblin’ Jack Elliott album, and learned it.

I was already familiar with Jim Garland’s union rewrite, which the Almanac singers had recorded on Talking Union:

I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.

For some reason, the union song never appealed to me but the love song stuck in my mind, and I’ve had a sort of odd history with it. I recorded it on my LP in the early 1980s, and again on my CD in the late 1990s, but I’ve never played it in public — I have no idea why, but there it is.

It was one of the most popular ballads with early rural recording artists, and there are fine versions by some of the best: Buell Kazee, Clarence Ashley, Walter Williams (an obscure banjo player from Kentucky, whose version was one of the banjo arrangements Pete Seeger worked out and published in How to Play the 5-String Banjo), and the Carter Family. I’m guessing the Carters were Ramblin’ Jack’s source, probably via Woody Guthrie.