On the Evening Train
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In contrast to Cash’s funerary reading of “Train,” O’Day’s – in a string band arrangement with prominent harmonica – pulses with life. Her guileless performance may hint at the vulnerabilities that felled her – it’s hard to imagine so openhearted an artist surviving the music industry intact. A 1962 rendition by bluegrass singer Wilma Lee Cooper echoes O’Day’s solemn exuberance and ups its stridency.
“Death train” songs are as old as the railroads and 19th and 20th century variants recount wrecks, chases and battles, funeral processions, and “Sweet Chariot”-style journeys to heaven. Beside these, Williams’ song stands out for its brevity and compacted narrative. An early genius of the two-and-a-half minute single format that swept midcentury radio and jukeboxes, Williams drew on ballads but thrived at snapshots. “Train’s” few verses and fewer adjectives set it apart from its Victorian and hillbilly ancestors.
Chicago and Northwestern train depot, Freeport, IL, 1917 (postcard; Chuckman’s Photos website)
Train of sorrow
The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last – the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won’t.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gussie L. Davis (1863-1899) (photographer unknown; Library of Congress)
Two such precursors, long-form fin-de-siècle ballads, are attributed to Gussie Davis – an early Tin Pan Alley scribe and one of the first commercially successful African-American songwriters. “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” (1896) and “He Is Coming to Us Dead” (1899) are typical tearjerkers of their time – parlor songs of a tragic bent that found their way over time from the drawing room to the street. Formulaic and sentimental, the best of these, like silent film melodramas, can still connect with modern audiences able to adapt to their stylization.
Both date from the early sheet music era, when copyrights were less regulated, and seem partly derived from non-original sources including printed verse. Both deal with bodies shipped by train, center on narrative twists, and were widely covered – often in versions with melodic or lyrical variations. It’s beyond unlikely that Williams – an unschooled songwriter who sharpened his skills by listening – never heard them.
“In the Baggage Coach Ahead” is the better-known tune and tells of a crying child, held in its father’s arms on an overnight Pullman trek, who arouses the ire of fellow passengers. “Make that child stop its noise,” the men hiss from their berths in Vernon Dalhart’s 1925 recording, “for it’s keeping us awake.” A woman intercedes:
“Where is its mother? Go take it to her”
This, a lady then softly said
“I wish that I could,” was the man’s sad reply
“But she’s dead in the coach ahead”
Vernon Dalhart: “In the Baggage Coach Ahead” (1925)
The reveal is not unexpected but the writing is restrained. The sobbing, motherless child evokes the “baby’s eyes … red from weeping” from “On the Evening Train.” When the women onboard rise to collectively comfort the child, the act is both touching and a reminder that trains were by nature communal – small villages of cramped but interactive travelers, so different from the depopulated sedans and wagons that supplanted them.
Every woman arose to assist with the child
There were mothers and wives on that train
And soon was the little one sleeping in peace
With no thought of sorrow or pain
Sheet music – Imogene Comer, inset (1896, Howley, Haviland & Co; Lester S. Levy Collection, Johns Hopkins University)
Vaudeville balladeer Imogene Comer debuted “Coach” onstage in turn-of-the-century Boston, quaintly accompanied by stereoscopic slide projections. But the song remained unrecorded until 1924, when a slew of hillbilly versions – by Ernest Thompson, George Renault, Fiddlin’ John Carson, then Dalhart the following year – introduced it to a new generation. Vernon Dalhart (real name Marion Slaughter) was a major figure in the evolution of country music – a classically-trained tenor, Texas-born but New York-based, who preferred opera to old-time music. He recorded thousands of light classical, dance band, and hillbilly sides under a hundred aliases between 1916 and 1939.
His version of “Coach” – country in spirit but still beholden to parlor song style – straddles bourgeois and busker modes, making hick music safe for respectable folks while deflating Gilded Age pomp. He trims Davis’ wordy original but still sings eight verses and two choruses. This chorus is especially unnecessary – a tearful contrivance (For baby’s face brings pictures / of a cherished hope that’s dead) that dulls the genuine emotion generated by the verses.