Once again, I learned this from the Cisco Houston songbook, and still sing it almost exactly as printed there, and like a lot of songs in that book it still comes into my head with the accompanying illustration, of a man who is presumably a prison guard, standing with his rifle.

Of course, like everyone else, I soon heard one of Lead Belly’s versions, which was undoubtedly Cisco’s source as well, since he includes many of Lead Belly’s points of reference: Sugarland penitentiary, where Lead Belly was imprisoned from 1918 to 1925, and the sheriff of Houston, Texas, whose name Cisco’s book gave as Benson Brocker (which is what I sing), but Lead Belly’s biographers give as Bason and Brock, explaining that A.W. Brock was the chief of police, but not giving any info on Bason.

The song was apparently known throughout the South, and was recorded several times in the 1920s, first by a white Oklahoman named Dave “Pistol Pete” Cutrell in 1926, then a year later by Crying Sam Collins, a black guitarist and singer from Louisiana and Mississippi, who has some wonderful variations on the standard melody. Bruce Jackson and other scholars have listed this as a popular prison song, circulated in oral tradition, but I’m struck by how similar the early recordings are, and have to wonder whether it also circulated in some more formal way, as a song sheet or performed by a popular black (or white?) vaudeville entertainer — though I have no basis whatsoever for that guess, aside from the fact that some relatively generic-sounding verses seem to have been firmly attached to this song all across the South.

In any case, pretty much everyone who now sings it uses variants of Lead Belly’s verses, with their Texas references and the mention of “Jumpin’ Judy,” which Steve Calt glosses as a slang term for a woman who would have sex with lots of men — a reasonable guess, since the word “Judy” was already noted in 1810 as slang for prostitute or, to be precise, for a “blowen,” a wonderfully archaic Briticism.

Some sources add that there was a legend in Sugarland (or in other prisons) that if the light of the midnight train shone on a prisoner through his window, he would soon be released. I am not aware of any solid evidence for this, and as far as I know it may have been invented by an imaginative folklorist… but if anyone out there knows more, please fill me in.

I learned this from a Pete Seeger songbook, American Favorite Ballads, and it was at least a dozen years before I became aware of its author, Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock, a cowboy, hobo, and IWW singer who also wrote “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” (as well as “The Trusty Lariat,” a.k.a. “The Cowboy Fireman“).

As usually sung, it’s in the genre of comic hobo songs, along with things like “I Just Don’t Want to Be Rich,” but the version we know is a censored shadow of what hobos actually sang — as McClintock explained, he had “to clean that song up; it wasn’t a parlor song, originally.”

As to what it was originally… that’s likely to remain a mystery. There is a story that McClintock  had to go to court to defend his copyright in the late 1920s, and established his authorship by explaining the story behind the original, but the quotations provided are instead quoted from an interview with Sam Eskin, issued by Folkways Records. McClintock explained that “the ambition of every hobo was to snare some kid to do his begging for him, among other things,” and when Eskin asked him to sing the original, uncensored version he declined. Presumably the lyrics related to those “other things” — specifically, serve as a “punk” — a word that by now has lost its original connotation of a boy kept for sexual purposes by an older man.

In American Songs of Protest, published in 1953, John Greenway wrote that McClintock sang an “original version of the song, which, despite the necessary expurgation, retains enough of the original significance to certify its precedence over other versions now current on family radio programs,” and quoted a different lyric than in McClintock’s recordings, including a final verse that went:

The punk rolled up his big blue eyes
And said to the jocker, “Sandy,
I’ve hiked and hiked and wandered too,
But I ain’t seen any candy.
I’ve hiked and hiked till my feet are sore,
I’ll be God damned if I hike any more,
To be    *     *     *     *     *     *     *      *
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.”

The problem with this ascription is that it is almost exactly the lyric printed by George Milburn in 1930, in The Hobo’s Handbook, and when Greenway recorded the song he filled the asterisks with the line in Milburn’s book: “To be a homeguard with a lemonade card.” So I doubt he actually got it from McClintock and there is no reason to think he knew a dirtier line.

Myriad internet sources and a few books and scholarly articles quote Greenway’s missing line as “To be buggered sore like a hobo’s whore,” but that lyric is a good example of the internet echo chamber: it started in 2002 with a writer on the Mudcat folk music site suggesting that lyric would fit the rhyme and meter of Greenway’s missing phrase, was picked up and repeated on other sites, and by 2010 was being reposted on mudcat as established fact.

Dave Van Ronk quoted me an alternate line that would fit the scan and almost make a rhyme for the Greenway verse: “And be cornholed till my ass is raw.” But I have no reason to think that was not just another attempt to fill in the asterisks, whether by Dave or one of his Village compatriots.

I’ve never heard anyone sing either of those lines, and a lot of songbooks even expurgate the basic hobo fantasy elements, removing references to alcohol, getting out of jail, and hanging “the jerk who invented work.” One of my ongoing projects is exploring the censorship of our musical and cultural history — the first published fruit was The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama, republishedin paperback as Talking ‘Bout Your Mama, and more recently a deep exploration of the original and censored lyrics of the Black sporting world, Jelly Roll Blues. In the process,  I’ve turned up even more graphic lyrics about hobos making use of young boys, which apparently was very common. McClintock described having to fight “like a wildcat” to protect himself from sexual assaults when he took to the road as a youth, and Ernest Hemingway traced his homophobia to similar experiences, writing:

I had certain prejudices against homosexuality since I knew its more primitive aspects. I knew it was why you carried a knife and would use it when you were in the company of tramps when you were a boy in the days when wolves was not a slang term for men obsessed by the pursuit of women.

Of which more to come when I get around to that book (which will also explore plenty of lyrics that provide positive depictions of homosexuality, and sexuality of many and varied kinds)….

Meanwhile, I sing the Seeger verses.

I probably first heard this on Pete Seeger’s American Favorite Ballads, vol. 5, which was my source for a bunch of songs. It was composed around the turn of the twentieth century by “Haywire Mac ” McClintock, who recorded it in 1928, and I later heard Bruce “Utah” Phillips sing it many times — he tended to finish shows by asking the audience to sing along and recognize that we’re all bums — in a positive, IWW kind of way — and need to respect one another and treat each other right in recognition of that fellowship.

I was surprised at first, because I hadn’t taken the song seriously, but aside from the chorus, which parodies an old revival hymn, it’s a pretty straightforward and welcoming expression of hobo life. It’s also a reminder of the days when guys in search of a hand-out didn’t just stand on streetcorners saying “Spare change?” or holding up signs describing their plight, but wentfrom house to house in working class areas, asking for a meal, sometimes in return for chopping wood or some other brief job. Likewise, travelers would knock on a farmer’s door and ask for a place to sleep — there was a popular country song called, “Can I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight, Mister.”

Unpleasant as that kind of begging could be — the refusals always outnumbered the acquiescences — it at least involved some communication with another human being. When I was a busker, I rather quickly stopped playing on the sidewalk with an open guitar case, and instead worked cafes, restaurants, and bars, where I would play and then go table to table, chatting briefly with people as they went through their pockets, and fairly often being invited for a drink. It made the whole experience more interesting and sociable, and also was good business — some regular customers got to thinking of me as their busker, and giving me an extra tip. When I was traveling, I would often combine passing the hat with asking for a place to stay, which may sound weird, but it worked fine. In Germany in the 1970s, I quickly learned not to ask for a place until I was done for the night, because I always found one in the first place I tried, and once someone had agreed to host me, they expected me to stick around and join the party. In the US it was harder, but especially in the South it tended to work out, and I met a lot of interesting people that way.

I never knocked on doors for food, but if you want a taste of that experience, and indeed of the whole hobo experience at the time McClintock was writing,I highly recommend Jack London’s autobiographical The Road (the whole book is online, for free — quite a change from the early 1980s, when I spent a couple of years searching for a copy). It’s a great read, and London traces his skills as a storyteller to his panhandling experience, writing:

I have often thought that to this training of my tramp days is due much of my success as a story-writer. In order to get the food whereby I lived, I was compelled to tell tales that rang true. At the back door, out of inexorable necessity, is developed the convincingness and sincerity laid down by all authorities on the art of the short-story. Also, I quite believe it was my tramp-apprenticeship that made a realist out of me. Realism constitutes the only goods one can exchange at the kitchen door for grub.

Incidentally, the verse about “Jim Hill” refers to James J. Hill, the fabulously wealthy builder and owner of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad lines.

I first heard this from Woody Guthrie, but that just tells you where and when I started listening to southern rural music, not where the song comes from. If we were looking for the earliest form of blues, this song is as good a nominee as any, and by the turn of the twentieth century it seems to have been known all over the South.

It was first recorded by a Virginia singer named Henry Whitter late in 1923, as “Lonesome Road Blues,” but a version that sounds even older was done the next year by a singer and multi-instrumentalist from North Carolina named Samantha Bumgarner, who traveled to New York in 1924 and made a dozen sides on fiddle and banjo — by some reports the first southern mountain banjo recordings ever made. She called her version “The Worried Blues,” and it sounds to me like the sort of music that was played on banjo before guitars became common in the southern mountains, mostly by African American musicians. Bumgarner was born in 1878, and by the 1920s was considered a representative of older and potentially dying traditions. She performed every year at Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s folk music and dance festival in Asheville, and was one of the players who inspired a teenage Pete Seeger to take up the five-string banjo after his father brought him there in 1935.

This song is typical of the sort of proto-blues (clearly related to later blues, though not yet called by that name) that had been common in black communities in the later 19th century, but had largely fallen out of favor by the time recording arrived and is mostly known from the work of white singers — one of the quirks of American musical history is that, at least until the later 20th century, African Americans were rarely nostalgic for any “good old days,” while white southerners were deeply devoted to their region’s past, and as a result white artists often preserved archaic black styles.

Whitter’s version is a lot closer to Woody’s, and may well have been Woody’s source, since it was a very popular record. They sing a lot of the same verses, which is a pretty fair clue, since the form of the song is so simple that there were hundreds of verses circulating and people routinely made up new ones. Some of my favorites are from the version by John Jackson, titled “Going Down to Georgia on a Hog”… but I still sing it more or less like I learned it from Woody.

One of the pleasures of this project is learning the background of songs I’ve known all my life. For example, I’ve known “The Eddystone Light” since I was a kid, but knew nothing about the Eddystone Lighthouse, though it turns out to be the most famous lighthouse in the British Isles. Inaugurated in 1698, it was the first offshore lighthouse ever constructed, though the original structure lasted barely two years and there have been three others there since.

As for the song, it seems to have originated in a considerably longer version as “The Man at the Nore” — the Nore was a lightship, which was an alternative to building offshore lighthouses. Apparently “The Man at the Nore” was quite a hit in mid-19th century British music halls, sung, according to contemporary sheet music, “by Arthur Lloyd, with rapturous applause.” Lloyd was a specialist in comic songs and one of the biggest stars of the early music hall, and there is a voluminous site about him online. I also found a nice broadside of “The Man at the Nore,” which begins with the same verse as the later “Eddystone Light,” but extends the story at considerably greater length.

A shortened American version, titled “The Eddystone Light” and similar to the one I sing, though with a somewhat different story and chorus, was already turning up in university songbooks by the late 1800s. College singing sessions were an important though rarely-mentioned influence on the later folk revival. Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag, one of the prime sources for mid-century folksingers, was largely compiled from musical get-togethers with students and professors, and that material was tailor-made for collegiate folk groups like the Kingston Trio, Brothers Four, and their ilk.

All of which said, the version everybody has sung since the 1950s came from the Weavers and Burl Ives — I’m not sure who did it first, but being from a good left-wing household I grew up on the Weavers recording.

I sing this in honor of my ex-half-sister-in-law Hazel, who will be mentioned frequently in later posts and who regularly requested it.

As best I can tell, I learned this simultaneously from Cisco Houston and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott — the voice I hear singing it in my head is Jack’s, but I can also visualize the page in Cisco’s songbook.

I assumed it was an old cowboy song, but when I set out to learn more about it before writing these notes, no one seemed to be able to trace it further back than Cisco. The tune is old, most commonly used for a song called “State of Arkansas,” about how horrible life was for a settler in that territory, and the theme of “Diamond Joe” is similar enough to suggest that one was composed in emulation of the other — but I couldn’t find anything more about it, except that there are at least two other unrelated songs about a character named Diamond Joe.

However, when I posted the link to this page on Facebook, Andy Hedges alerted me to a post on Robert Waltz and David Engle’s Ballad Index site that tells the whole story: the song was written by Baldwin “Butch” Hawes of the Almanac Singers for one of Alan Lomax’s radio plays, to fit a character in the script named Diamond Joe, and he set it to the tune of “State of Arkansas” because Lee Hayes was scripted to sing it and that was one of Lee’s regular numbers. Cisco was a member of the cast, and started singing it regularly, and everyone else then got it from him.

Anyway, it’s a great lyric, which I’ve always thought of as a companion piece to “The Buffalo Skinners” — they are both eloquent antidotes to all the songs about ridin’ and ropin’ and beautiful sunsets on the prairie, instead focusing on how lousy cowboy work was and how common it was (and is) for bosses to cheat itinerant workers. And Ramblin’ Jack does a fine version of it, which inspired mine, more or less.

Once again, I’ve known this so long that I don’t remember where I first heard it, but I do know where I learned the lyrics: out of Pete Seeger’s Bells of Rhymney songbook. Pete only occasionally played blues — he had a blues banjo solo that he tended to recycle as needed — but he loved the form and was friends with quite a few major blues artists, including Big Bill Broonzy, who was his source for this one. Since I got it from Pete, I associated it with Broonzy, and it was probably another dozen years before I heard Leroy Carr’s original, and at least a dozen more before I realized how important Carr was, or how big a hit he had with “When the Sun Goes Down” (which was the original title).

Quite simply, Carr was the most influential male blues singer of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, and arguably on into the ’50s and ’60s. His influence extended to the most isolated rural areas and the most sophisticated urban settings: from Broonzy, Lead Belly, and Robert Johnson to Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (both of whom recalled Carr’s “How Long–How Long” as their first song), it is hard to come up with male blues singers who did not perform his pieces, but his influence went far beyond blues. “When the Sun Goes Down” was recorded by the Ink Spots, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and later by Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, and numerous gospel singers also trained on Carr’s records. Not to mention Pete Seeger.

Carr’s genius was to blend the blues tradition with the new style of “crooning” pop vocals. Previous singers had needed to have loud voices to be heard in theaters or on street corners without amplification, but Carr was primarily a recording artist and his most popular songs were intimate ballads: “When the Sun Goes Down” followed “How Long–How Long,” “Midnight Hour Blues,” and “Blues Before Sunrise,” all moody, impressionistic pieces to be played in a quiet apartment or cabin, or on a barroom jukebox late at night. He also recorded plenty of rowdy, upbeat songs, some of which also became standards, including “Sloppy Drunk” and a series of songs about a beleaguered husband, such as “Papa Wants a Cookie” and “Papa’s on the Housetop.” But it was the ballads that were remembered, and this was one of his best–as well as becoming a pattern for numerous later songs, including Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” which even mimicked the wordless, moaning break from Carr’s record.

I could go on and on about this — Carr is one of my passions — but just to show that I’m not alone: After I did my biography of Josh White, Society Blues, I was hired by Smithsonian/Folkways to write the notes for their Josh White CD, and mentioned Carr in those notes as the most influential male blues singer of the first half of the twentieth century. Kip Lornell, Lead Belly’s biographer and a very knowledgeable researcher, was assigned the task of fact-checking that booklet, and he called me up with a few questions and suggestions. I accepted most of them gratefully, but then he asked about my comment on Carr, suggesting it was a little over the top and I should tone it down to “one of the most influential.”

I said, “Sure, Kip, if you can come up with some others who were equally influential.”

There was a long pause… and then Kip said, “OK, I guess we’ll let that one stand.”

I started playing “Freight Train” as my regular encore piece in the 1980s, after realizing that I hadn’t heard anyone do it in about fifteen years. Everybody had quit playing it because it was so overdone – like the Yogi Berra line* – so I had it to myself, which was great. Nowadays, there are probably some young folk-blues fans who have never even heard it – which in terms of the popular culture of my youth is sort of like not having heard “Stairway to Heaven,” except that I don’t envy them.

I probably heard “Freight Train” for the first time by Peter, Paul and Mary – which would mean I heard it on one of my little sister’s records, and dismissed it accordingly, along with “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Of course, I learned to play it anyway, because everybody who played fingerpicking guitar in those days learned “Freight Train.” And I’m sure I at least knew Elizabeth Cotten’s name and the basic story of her emergence on the folk scene, which is one of the odder artifacts of the revival:

Cotten was from North Carolina, and had learned to play guitar there as a girl. She was left-handed, so worked out her own way to play upside-down, using her index finger to play an alternating bass and playing the melody with her index finger. (Since most old-time fingerstyle players used only thumb and index finger, this was not all that different from the way other people played, though it meant she couldn’t use a strong thumb to drive the bass for a dance beat.)

The curious part of the story was that she got a job as maid and babysitter for Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, and played music sometimes for their children, including Mike and Peggy. (Pete was an older half-brother, from Charles Seeger’s previous family.) Mike recorded her and introduced “Freight Train” to the rest of the folk scene, and by the early 1960s Cotten was performing at concerts and festivals, and recording albums for the Folkways label. She introduced several other songs to the standard repertoire, including “Oh, Babe, It Ain’t No Lie,” “Shake Sugaree,” and an instrumental called “Wilson Rag,” which was one of the first pieces Dave Van Ronk taught me.

All of which is interesting enough, but “Freight Train” was by far her best-known song – indeed, so well known that I considered it trite and overdone. Then I heard Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry do it, on the same Fantasy double-album blues anthology where I first heard Van Ronk sing “Cocaine Blues” (That also may have been my first taste of the Reverend Gary Davis and Tom Rush, and certainly was where I first heard the Holy Modal Rounders.) They had a bunch of verses I’d never heard before, and I recently realized that my favorite went back to Clara Smith’s “Freight Train Blues”:

I asked the brakeman, let me ride the blinds,
I asked the brakeman, please let me ride the blinds.
The brakeman said, “Clara, you know this train ain’t mine.”

Like a lot of male, guitar-playing blues fans of my generation, I didn’t pay much attention to the “blues queens” of the 1920s, with the exception of Bessie Smith, who I heard by way of Louis Armstrong and jazz, so I didn’t realize the extent to which the recordings of Clara Smith and Ida Cox were major sources for rural blues musicians in the 1920s. I never listened to Elizabeth Cotten either, because her high, wavering soprano didn’t appeal to me. Honestly, one of the reasons I liked Brownie and Sonny’s version of “Freight Train” was that it fitted my notion of a masculine freight-hopping life, while I thought of Cotten’s version (not to mention PP&M’s) as relatively wimpy. Which is to say, I had a lot to learn…

…and still do, but at least I came around on “Freight Train.”

* Berra famously said of a St. Louis Restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

I have no idea where I learned this, though I’m pretty sure it was early. I assumed I’d got it from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who were favorites of mine, but they don’t seem to have done it, and the only version I can find of it in my LPs is by the Irish Rovers, and is nothing like I remember…

The versions in general circulation seem mostly to descend from the Dubliners’ recording, and I assume that’s how it came to me — albeit at second or third hand — but that’s just a guess. In any case, the song has a long and well-researched lineage, back to the ballad of an Irish highwayman named Patrick Flemming who was executed in 1650. That ballad, given in full on other folklore sites, includes a fair number of lines that overlap my version, and an identical theme:

My whore she proved false and that is the reason
Or else Patrick Flemming had never been taken,
When I was asleep and knew nothing of the matter
Then she loaded my arms with water

By about 1850 it had taken something very close to its modern form, and was published in a broadsheet as “The Sporting Hero, or Whiskey in the Bar” (reproduced below). It was very popular on both sides of the Atlantic, as it remains to the present — for the obvious reason that it’s an entertaining, rowdy, rebellious story, and a lot of fun to sing.

Yet another I learned from Cisco Houston, recalling the waves of Irish laborers who immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century and built most of the eastern rail system —  while the western rail lines were built mostly by Chinese immigrants.

The stereotype of the harried but cheerful Irish workingman was already an English theatrical staple in Shakespeare’s time, and this song wanders the permeable boundary between folk and pop music. In Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong, Norm and David Cohen write that “it is not certain whether it originated among Irish laborers or among Irish professional entertainers.” Nor is it certain what “it” means, since the song is vaguely dated to the 1850s and already existed in numerous variants by the late 1800s.

The earliest documented version seems to have been a sea chantey, which didn’t have the pseudo-Gaelic “fillamee-ooree-airee-ay” chorus. The version that is currently best known in Ireland — due largely to the Dubliners — has yet another chorus about “wearing corduroy britches, digging ditches.” Some folklorists have rejected all versions as minstrel show confections, and I’d bet aces to oranges that the Dubliners’ version is stage-Irish, but I’d guess Cisco’s had made its way into oral tradition by the time he got it.

The song is often titled “Paddy” rather than “Pat,” and both were generic names for Irish characters back in the days when comic Irish minstrelsy was almost as common as comic blackface minstrelsy — some recent scholars have proposed the term “greenface.” The overlaps between Irish and black stereotypes are well worth exploring, but can easily be overstated, since most stage Irishmen were in fact Irish, while most stage Negros were white (frequently Irish) performers in blackface make-up. (There were plenty of fake Irish as well, including Harpo Marx, whose red wig was a survival of his original stage character, an Irish Patsy Brannigan.)

I guess that’s my excuse for digging this one out — along with the fact that these songs survived in oral tradition among Irish singers, often as expressions of working-class pride. Another song Cisco recorded, “Drill, Ye Tarriers,” has a great pair of verses about an Irish laborer facing particularly harsh labor conditions:

Our new foreman was Jim McGann,
By golly, he was a blame mean man.
One day a premature blast went off
And a mile in the sky went Big Jim Goff.
Drill, ye tarriers, drill.

When next payday come around,
Jim Goff a dollar short was found,
When he asked the reason, got this reply:
“You were docked for the time you were up in the sky.”
Drill, ye tarriers, drill.