On the Evening Train
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“Coach’s” scenario is entirely plausible and this likely contributed to its wide-range appeal. Davis’ sheet music was marketed as “based on fact” (with no substantiating details) – a common promotional gimmick. Yet stories circulated for years that the song had a real-life protagonist – a Missouri medical doctor named James B. Watson, who in 1869 accompanied his wife Abigail’s body to their home state of Pennsylvania for burial. Various writers, including folklorist Vance Randolph, repeated these claims and named a daughter, Nellie Klapmeyer (née Watson), as the song’s distraught child.
Nellie Watson Klapmeyer (1867-1926) – passport photo (National Archives; Ancestry.com)
Much of this is verifiable. The doctor’s name was John E. – not James B. – Watson, but otherwise names, dates, and places line up. Watson (1839-1881), a Montgomery County physician, married Abigail Benscoter (1839-1869) who gave birth to Nellie Forrest Watson in 1867. Abigail died two years later and in 1871 her widower remarried and fathered additional children. In 1885, Nellie married Kansas City banker James Klapmeyer and they raised a family of their own. She died in Nebraska in 1926. Missing from the record is any mention of the train journey or grieving child, but the bare bones are there.
Musicologist Sigmund Spaeth went further, positing that Davis – who once worked as a Pullman porter – personally witnessed the event that inspired the song. This would preclude the Watson theory as Davis, born in 1863, would have been six years old when Abigail died. More likely is a similar assertion – that Davis encountered the tale via another eyewitness, a conductor and former porter named Frank Archer who dabbled in poetry and published an obscure, same-scenario poem called “Mother” in the waning years of the century (the Davis and Archer compositions share no text). Muddying already cloudy waters, a handful of other 19th century poems, published after the Civil War and possibly set to music, give comparable accounts.
Pullman on-board staff, including porters: B&O Capitol Ltd., Chicago, early 20th century (photographer unknown; museumoftheamericanrailroad.org)
The second Davis song, “He Is Coming to Us Dead,” concerns not a fraught child or bereaved husband but a grieving father. An aged man stands on a train platform. He tells an inquiring clerk that he’s waiting for his son, who’s “coming home today.” The clerk informs him he’s at the wrong terminal – a freight depot – and tries to redirect him to a passenger station “just o’er the way.”
“You do not understand me, sir”
The old man shook his head
“He’s not coming as a passenger
But by express instead”
Grayson and Whitter: “He Is Coming to Us Dead” (1927)
Once more, a passenger is freight. As with “Coach,” the twist is predictable but subtly rendered. When the train pulls in with its precious cargo a crowd gathers, “showing signs of grief and tears,” and surrounds the man in solidarity – recalling the women who comfort the child in “Coach.” A “long white casket” is lowered to the ground, evoking the identical vessel in “On the Evening Train.”
The final verse adds another twist: we learn that the old man’s son is a soldier, presumably killed in action, and that his grieving (offscreen) mother predicted the boy’s death when he enlisted.
“He broke his poor old mother’s heart
Her fears have all come true
She said it’s the way he’d come back
When he joined the boys in blue”
G.B. Grayson and Henry Whitter, 1920s (promotional photo; Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music)
Like its predecessor, “Dead” found its way from Victorian venues to 78 RPM discs during the hillbilly boom. First recorded in 1927 by old-time duo Grayson and Whitter, they mostly retain Davis’ lyric (while altering his melody) but recast the song in down-home style, complete with folksy spoken interjections (“Take warning, good people”) between stanzas. Later versions – by Doc Watson (1964), The New Lost City Ramblers (1966), and Ralph Stanley (1996) – derive from their template. (A 2000 variation by Darrell Scott and Tim O’Brien is discussed in a previous post here.)