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Despite the song’s 1899 copyright, the appellation “boys in blue” probably implies Union troops and a Civil War setting. Imperialist ventures in Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the century saw khaki uniforms replacing military blues, and romantic ardor surrounding the War Between the States remained high. Grayson and Whitter’s final spoken interjection, heard after the song’s last couplet (She said it’s the way he’d come back/ when he joined the boys in blue) is acerbic – perhaps unsurprising in a recording made in 1927, just nine years after the “war to end all wars” took 117,000 American lives:

A lot of them come back that way, too

“Dead” was revisited during the ‘60s folk revival, often with an antiwar flavor. A striking version by Steve Ledford – cut in 1971 when the former Carolina Ramblers String Band fiddler was 65 and had seen his share of wars – explicitly updates the song as “He’s Comin’ from Vietnam.” A somber rendition by Ron Thomason of Dry Branch Fire Squad, featured regularly in the bluegrass band’s 21st century live shows, retains Grayson and Whitter’s quip and refashions the song for our own era of endless war.

Boys in blue: color guard of the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, just mustered in, 1861 (photographer unknown; ohiohistorycentral.org)

Edward Hopper: “Railroad Sunset” (oil on canvas, 1929; Whitney Museum of American Art)

Coda

We begin to see that the underlying meaning of all they want to tell us and have always failed to communicate is the poem, the poem which their lives are being lived to realize.
— William Carlos Williams, The Doctor Stories (compiled by Robert Coles, 1984)

Dying people often talk of travel. They think and dream about it, sometimes startling bedside attendants by emerging slightly from the fog of deep sleep to make crystal clear pronouncements like “I’m going on a trip,” or “I’m checking in my luggage,” or “I’m getting on the plane.” When my first wife died of cancer, the end came after a chaotic year of failed treatment following an intense period of personal change – finishing law school, passing the Bar, planning a family, buying a house. Her last words, spoken with urgency as she slipped into her terminal coma, are seared in my psyche and always bring tears: “I’m about to start my vacation.”

Cash’s version of “On the Evening Train” moves me beyond its merit. The critic in me knows it’s a fine version of a good not great song. But I listen to it helpless, my objectivity shattered. Cash’s quavering voice and Williams’ simple words, joined together as the former faced death and coped with the loss of his beloved, place me on the platform every time, reliving my own losses as the baby weeps and the casket loads. For me, writing about music requires finding the right balance between heart and brain. But it’s an uneasy equilibrium: the former motivates me to share my passion, the latter provides a means for doing so but also risks containing it.

Jon Langford: “June and Johnny” (multi-media, 2007; permission of the artist: www.yarddog.com)

Davis’ parlor-turned-hillbilly ballads and their kin use a once familiar circumstance – the transport of bodies by railroad – and a metaphoric sense of train travel as life’s (and afterlife’s) journey to process grief over wrenching loss. They are homely but all too human – everyday evocations of the need for meaning and closure that accompanies death. Cash’s “Train” recalls both its singer’s restless life and the travel metaphors instinctively invoked by the dying.

Such songs didn’t end with Davis, Williams, or Cash – they continue to be revived and rewritten, their motifs mined for new ways to tell eternal stories. But their heyday ended with that of the trains, around mid-century. A closing example follows a now familiar practical path – written by professional songwriters (Joseph Ettlinger, Billy and Dedette Lee Hill in 1931), first recorded by hillbilly singers (Asa Martin and James Roberts in 1933), later a chart hit for a country superstar (Hank Snow in 1958). It also captures their timeless melancholy:

There’s a little box of pine on the 7:29
Bringing back a lost sheep to the fold
In the valley there are tears as the train of sorrow nears
The sun is gone, the world seems dark and cold

Martin and Roberts: “There’s a Little Box of Pine on the 7:29” (1933)