On the Evening Train
“Night scene on the New York Central Railroad” (c. 1884, J. W. Pratt & Co., artist unknown; Library of Congress)
The girl I love / Is on that train and gone
— “Worried Man Blues”
It’s hard to know
Before he died in 2003, Johnny Cash recorded tracks for what became the first posthumous collection of his American series – Volume V: A Hundred Highways, released in 2006. I picture the Man in Black as he’s shown on the cover, seated before a microphone and music stand in semidarkness, scanning a lyric sheet through bifocals. When the playback hits his headphones – simple guitar, later augmented with understated overdubs – he strains against the accumulated aches and pains of hard living, myriad surgeries, and the recent death of his wife to find his voice and give the song life. The resulting vocal is measured, slightly over-enunciated, but still stirring. Like Billie Holiday’s end-of-career Lady in Satin period, Cash’s final recordings find his once booming voice diminished – at times a near croak. But as with Lady Day, this frailty affords them a new emotional frankness as aesthetic nicety slips away.
Facing death, country music’s lion in winter sings about it. He channels long gone Hank Williams in a song the Lost Highwayman wrote (co-credited to wife Audrey) but never recorded – an earnest tune about loss and separation that mines Victorian parlor songs and hillbilly ballads for inspiration and finds its main metaphor in America’s once vast train mythology. Cash sets the scene in near-slow motion, pausing so deliberately in the middle of lines that he turns them into couplets:
I heard the laughter … at the depot
But my tears … fell like the rain
When I saw them place … that long white casket
On the baggage coach … of the evening train
Johnny Cash: “On the Evening Train” (2006)
Place and tone are sketched in a few strokes. For a modern listener, the non-Amtrak train and baggage car coffin set the song squarely in a sepia-hued past – a lost time when trains and railroads were ubiquitous settings for experiences lived and imagined. But the dissonant juxtaposition of laughter and tears rings true across generations, familiar to anyone who’s suffered a profound loss and been jarred by others going about their business in an ordinary way, unaware that the world has changed. The next verse – second of just four (there is no chorus), though the last will be repeated – swiftly fills out characters and defines the tragedy.
The baby’s eyes … are red from weeping
Its little heart … is filled with pain
“Oh, Daddy” it cried … “they’re taking Mama
Away from us … on the evening train”
Johnny Cash, 1969 (Joel Baldwin, LOOK Magazine; Wikipedia, Library of Congress)
The best American recordings are masterfully minimal – music and voice stripped to essences that maximize emotional power and favor singer over song. The care given every facet of their stark design – sonic, thematic, presentational – by producer and Cash collaborator Rick Rubin extends both to song selection and an old school, album-as-songbook concern with running order. Tracks on each volume are treated like chapters in an unfolding narrative. “On the Evening Train” falls exactly halfway through Cash’s last album – the end of side one on vinyl, and that moment when you either flip the LP over or set it aside for later listening. Either way the break prompts a reflective pause, and in the current context it’s both elegiac and nostalgic. “Train” is the only track on American V that’s set unambiguously in the past – in a bygone era when people both living and dead mostly traveled by train.
As I turned to walk … away from the depot
It seemed I heard … her call my name
“Take care of my baby … and tell him, darlin’
That I’m going home … on the evening train”
Johnny Cash and June Carter, 1969 (Joel Baldwin, LOOK Magazine; Wikipedia, Library of Congress)
June Carter, Cash’s wife and bedrock partner of 35 years, died suddenly during the sessions for American V and her incorporeal form seems to hover over its songs and their bereaved singer. Listening to “Train,” it’s easy to place her in the song’s long white casket and her widower at the depot – stunned and silent, his only solace the knowledge that he’ll soon be joining her, and his religious faith that the reunion will be literal. After June died, Cash told Rubin, “I need something to do every day. Otherwise there’s no reason for me to be here.” So the pair put scores of songs on tape, starting the day after her passing, during the mere three months that Cash outlived her.