Here are the complete notes by Archie Green for The Railroad In Folksong. (I figured more than one might like to read them) I made a rough spell check of my scan, but I did not remove all the hyphens, and likely missed a few paragraph breaks. I also did not put in all the html for italics, etc. It should be easily readable, though. (Stewie, I'll get to my comments about the albums later)

A new nation hacked out of a wilderness-spanning mountain, prairie, forest, desert-gave its builders a tremendous affection for the tools of transport. Ox team, covered wagon, canal boat, clipper ship, locomotive, and motor truck became folklore cluster points. Of all these machines in the United States, none attracted more songs and stories than the iron horse. Not only did the sheer physical labor expended in lacing a con- tinent with track Pulsate in lyric work songs, but hundreds of tragic wrecks sparked dramatic ballads, and many brave trainmen were memo- rialized in touching elegies. Apart from such obvious subjects was the alternate use of the train as a symbol for escape, freedom or salvation. Fortunately, railroadiana is well documented. When Ben Botkin, Frank Donovan, Alvin Harlow and Freeman Hubbard caught steam and whistle in printed narrative and anecdote, folksong collectors etched parallel pieces into sound recordings. This album takes up samples of railroad material-some of which originated in the 1920s: mountain, country, hillbilly. At that time the recording industry's artists and repertoire men gathered a fine harvest. We do not question whether Ralph Peer and his fellow scouts consciously sought railroad songs; we know -only that RCA Victor vaults hold excellent examples of such items comparable to the best Library of Congress field variants.

Actually, Victor's presentation of rail lore was underway in 1910 when Billy Murray sang the classic Casey Jones, followed by the Peer- less Quartet harmony on Drill Ye Tarr-iers Drill. These Tin Pan Alley favorites were also known by traditional singers, but Victor recorded no white, rural folksingers in any systematic manner until after Wreck e)f the Old 97 and The Prisoner's Song, an influential disc by Vernon Dalhart, became a bit. Since then, many recorded railroad folksongs have enriched society.

A characteristic of folklore is that we never learn the full history of songs or their singers. Some selections and performers on this LP are well known to rail fans and folksong buffs, while others are unknown, even to specialists. The album's design is sixteen railroad pieces, dating from about 1870 to 1940, which portray a cross section of themes in various musical styles. Excluded is the category of hobo folksong, which is connected to railroading. Many well-loved train numbers by Jimmie Rodgers, Wilf Carter, the Blue Sky Boys and others are also excluded because they are available on current RCA Victor or Camden reissues.

The train itself-steam engine, rattling boxcar, luxurious sleeper-is a complex object in folklore. The song, usually secondary in importance, is central here. Countless folksingers have honed these texts and tunes against the edge of experience at the roundhouse and boarding- house, depot and water tank. The rough-handed gandydancer or lonely boomer who added a plaintive melodic line to a poetic commonplace was as gifted as the Currier and Ives artist catching the visual excite- ment of the iron monster on the lithographer's stone.

THE RAILROAD IN FOLKSONG, is a multi-faceted anthology-national history, verbal art, musical display. You are invited to entrain for a ride backwards into nostalgia or ahead into fresh perceptions of Amer- ican experience.

Many railroads were honored by songs; few became famous folk- songs. A current bluegrass standard, with a gypsy rhapsody's verve, is Orange Blossom Special, composed by Ervin Rouse (a Floridian, origi- nally from Craven County, North Carolina). He recognized that his piece about a Seaboard Railroad flyer, in a sense, became anonymous during his lifetime whembe told Johnny Cash, "The Special belongs to everybody by now." Doc Walsh, Garley Foster and T. C. Ashley, in various combinations, constituted a fine country string band, 1926-1932. The Carolina Tar Heels performed a wide range of material including "mountain blues." The Train's Done Left Me is one of numerous complaints about the railroad's seemingly main function-to carry a lover away. George Alley, a Chesapeake & Ohio engineer (Fast Flying Vestibule), was killed at Hinton, West Virginia, on October 23, 1890. The ballad of his death spread rapidly and has been recovered under unusual titles. Sarah Carter learned Engine One-Forty-Three as a youngster. After the Carter Family's disc became popular, it served as a model for later' variants and parodies.

Irish immigrant laborers in American industry coined many songs commenting on new work roles. One such narrative, Jerry, Go Ile That Car, circulated during the 1880s from the Canadian Rockies to New Mexico's Santa Fe line. Harry K. McCllintock ("Haywire Mac"), who started as a Pennsylvania Railroad brakeman in 1902, enriched folklore by writing short stories and collecting boomer, hobo, and cowboy songs. A mountain string band, the Jimmie Rodgers Entertainers, accom- panied Rodgers to Bristol, Virginia-Tennessee, for his recording debut.

Without its "star" the group called itself the Tenneva Ramblers. If I Die a Railroad Man is usually an expressive stanza in diverse lyric songs, but the Ramblers placed the cliché in a 1917 wartime departure piece. The song dates back to a Civil War "Soldier's Farewell." Two Virginian Railway trains collided at Ingleside, West Virginia, on May 24, 1927. Engineer Aldrich and Fireman O'Neal were killed by flash scalding; the second train's crew escaped death. Immediately after the tragedy, Blind Alfred Reed recorded The Wreck of the Virginian. Although his style was fully traditional, there is no evidence that this ballad got away from its composer.

Negro labor was used in railroad construction throughout the South. Tunnel drilling, track lining, and spike driving chants moved about freely. Consequently, hammer songs-often part of the John Henry complex-entered white repertoires. The Monroe Brothers recorded Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy at their first Bluebird session.

Native frontier humor featured bumpkins, braggarts, and fighter- hunters in tall tales. This genre lingers in rural drama wedded to com- mercial country music. The use of the train ride as a frame for droll talk and rustic instrumentals appears on other discs; however, it is best demonstrated by Jimmie Davis, a former Louisiana governor, on The Davis Limited. The Wabash Cannonball, a legendary train running everywhere, de- serves to have a colorful novel written about it. Wabash Company files list two (1880s) models: a Chicago to Kansas City or a St. Louis to Omaha flyer. In 1904 William Kindt secured a copyright for his ar- rangement of the song; subsequently it has been used by folk, pop, Dixie, country-western, and rockabilly performers. The Delmore Brothers, an Alabama duo, contribute a close-harmony The Cannon Ball.

While certain lyric folksongs are constant in structure, others attract an array of floating elements. One such conglomerate is titled "In the Pines," "John Brown's Coal Mine," "Lonesome Road," "Black Girl." J. E. Mainer's Mountaineers, a western North Carolina string band, center The Longest Train on a girl's macabre death in the locomotive's driver wheel.

Vernon Dalhart is but one pseudonym for Marion Try Slaughter from Jefferson, Texas. His stage and recording career was fabulous. Wreck of the Old 97 (a Southern Railway mail train wreck at Danville, Virginia, on September 27, 1903) is well known. Railroad Brotherhood journals constantly printed poems, some of which became folksongs. A favorite, in printed and oral form, is The Red and Green Signal Lights (also called "The Two Lanterns," "The Child of the Engineer"). This version is by two pioneer recording artists, 0. B. Grayson, a blind farmer-minstrel from Laurel Bloomery, Tennessee, and Henry Whitter, a textile hand from Fries, Virginia.

A part of the Southern Railway's system is described in Peanut Special, which ran from Columbia to Chester, South Carolina. Byron Parker and His Mountaineers made the rollicking trip frequently. The band is known for its role in the transition of old time to bluegrass music.

Hugh, Ray, and Roy D'Autremont robbed a Southern Pacific train at Oregon's Siskiyou Pass on October 11, 1923, murdering the engineer, fireman, brakeman, and mail clerk by shotgun and dynamite. This brutal event's ballad was composed after the Northwest loggers were im- prisoned in 1927. Crime of the D'Autremont Brothers by the Johnson Brothers, like some other broadsides, is folk in style but with no life in tradition. Charles and Paul Johnson were from eastern Tennessee.

Train sounds-whistles, wheel clicks on tracks, engine Roars-have long intrigued folk musicians. Fiddles, guitars, pianos, and harmonicas became railroads in the hands of dynamic artists. Train imitations, common to white and Negro players, preceded phonograph recordings. Palmer McAbee, an Alabaman, gave his name to McAbee's Railroad Piece.

The Grand Ole Opry, in its first decade, featured a handful of Tennessee string bands like Paul Warmack's Gully Jumpers. The Little Red Caboose Behind the Train is a folk parody of Will Hay's minstrel classic "The Little Log Cabin in the Lane." Railroaders delighted in caboose ditties which evoked the warmth of a trainman's home and the spirit of his final parting.

Archie Green Mr. Green is a vice-president of the John Edwards Memorial Foundation at UCLA, an archival center dedicated to the study of recorded folk music. Thanks go to Eugene Earle, Dave Freeman, Guthrie Meade, Bob Pinson and Peter Tamony for their assistance in source material and data.