Railroad Man - Hank Snow (1963)
I’ll never start my own band, but if I did I’d call it Songs About Trains We’ve Never Seen and our entire repertoire would be songs about trains.
There’s this huge chunk of song culture that assumes you know a lot about trains, from the names of particular lines to the types of engines to the particulars of how conductors operate their machinery. It probably used to fit pretty well with the average amount of knowledge you got growing up. Trains were cultrally important to generations of kids for most of a century.
Trains are still a key to our modern infrastructure, but nobody cares anymore. The particulars of the industry are mostly invisible, until you get stuck waiting for one to cross the highway. Even if kids love trains, we expect that they’ll grow out of it. If they don’t, and they still love trains as a grown-up, it’s seen as an eccentricity. The whole modernist romantic ideal of trains is consigned to the past. It’s an odd corner of things odd people know about, like the differences between different versions of the USS Enterprise, or which ponies from G4 show up in G5. (Interestingly, similarly niche and esoteric knowledge about a football game from 2008 is considered perfectly normal to have rattling around your head.)
This is all to say that I really dig songs about trains, and that the excellent troubador of the West, Hank Snow, recorded a whole album full of them.
Tracks I Liked
Ghost Trains - OK, music nerd time: This borrows a tune from the 40s western tune Ghost Riders In The Sky, which itself borrows heavily from the 19th century When Johnny Comes Marching Home. There’s a strain of the songbook that’s concerned with the “old, weird America” where things happen according to rules that the narrator of the song doesn’t really understand but just stands witness to. As we marched through history, the context of those unexplainable events became more and more interwoven with the technology of the time. Ghosts riding in the sky got replaced with train engines racing through the clouds… I’m still talking, aren’t I?
The Wreck Of The Number Nine - also called Wreck of The Old 97, this is a folk tradition of a story of woe and tragedy that got turned into a modern day parable.
Lonesome Whistle - The most famous song about trains? maybe.
