On the Evening Train
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Jimmie Rodgers (1897-1933) (promotional photo; Wikipedia, P.D.)
American V opens with a prayer – Larry Gatlin’s weary “Help Me,” a country gospel tune popularized in the early ‘70s by Elvis and Kris Kristofferson – and closes with “I’m Free from the Chain Gang Now,” a prison release song first recorded in 1933 by a dying, TB-wracked Jimmie Rodgers. (The Singing Brakeman also recorded scores of songs during his final months; his last session, cut with the singer resting on a cot between takes, occurred just two days before his death.) Both were recorded by Cash earlier in his career and are revisited in slowed down, simplified versions – thematic bookends to the album’s end-of-life chronicle that resemble the invocation and benediction of a Protestant church service.
In between are songs of struggle and acceptance, of love for June, even sardonic reflections on success and fame. In “Like the 309,” another train song and his last recorded composition, he grouses wryly about his asthma-addled lungs and calls for an electric fan to cool his “gnarly ol’ head.” “Then load my box on the 309,” he sings, ready to go. “Gonna get outta here on the 309.” As in “Train,” death is this engine’s ultimate engineer. But Williams’ song and Cash’s performance are too grief-stricken for levity. Because as many of us discover, in the end, dying is far easier than being left behind.
I pray that God … will give me courage
To carry on … ’til we meet again
It’s hard to know … she’s gone forever
They’re carrying her home … on the evening train
St. Paul and Des Moines train depot, Nevada, Iowa, c. 1910-1920 (photographer unknown; Library of Congress)
Coming to us dead
Today, it taxes the imagination of young people to appreciate the impact that the rails once had on their grandparents.
— Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (1981)
Edward Hopper: “Toward Boston” (watercolor on paper, 1936; Hirschl & Adler Modern Collection)
Historical shifts end eras of shared experience but leave rich residues of anecdote and artifact in their wake. Trains once crisscrossed this country in staggering numbers, consigning passengers and freight the way veins and arteries pump blood through the body. Between 1830 and 1945, they transformed life – reducing travel time, connecting far-flung communities, depleting wilderness (and Native Americans), and streamlining capitalism. They inspired a sweeping mythology that permeates folklore and the arts to this day.
All this is common knowledge, but the fact that passengers sometimes were the freight – lifeless cargo stored a short stroll from coach car seating – is less well remembered. It’s the sort of private sphere detail more likely to turn up in art or memoir than historical record, and a common enough feature in train songs to merit a chapter in Cohen’s massive book. But the “young people” he alludes to are now middle-aged and possibly grandparents themselves. As the last generation that remembers the railroads’ heyday disappears, such details – rooted in a lived sense of the trains’ onetime centrality in public and private life – risk fading as well.
Home funeral, Beaver Falls, PA, early 20th century (photographer unknown; orderofthegooddeath.com)
“On the Evening Train” was written in 1949, after a last crescendo of railroad travel saw millions of American servicemen routed cross-country during World War II. Hundreds of thousands were also shipped to hometown or federal cemeteries for burial. The gradual supersession that followed – of trains by planes and automobiles – extended to transport of the dead. Bodies moved by hearse, jet, or freight train became the norm. Postwar America also saw death increasingly sanitized and hidden away. Like bodies kept in parlors or family burials on private land, the conveyance of the dead by train now feels fabled and unfamiliar.
“Train” was first recorded the same year by country singer Molly O’Day. Little remembered today, O’Day was the unvarnished real deal – a coal-miner’s daughter from Appalachia who sang in a gutsy alto not unlike country matriarch Sara Carter. She recorded 36 sides for Columbia from 1946-1951 before tuberculosis and a nervous breakdown curtailed her career (she survived the former; withdrew into church work and occasional gospel singing after the latter). Five of these were Hank Williams tunes and the last, “Train,” seems to have been written with her in mind. Details on the song’s composition are scant but its split authorship with Audrey, the only such credit in Williams’ songbook, raises eyebrows. Their tempestuous relationship aside, Audrey’s musical ability was slight (she never wrote or co-wrote another song) but her professional ambition, boundless.
Molly O’Day: “The Evening Train” (1949)