I stand corrected: Of course, I should have said that Hurt never recorded "Waitin' for a Train." All of us undoubtedly play and sing a greater number of songs than we perform in public, certainly more of them than we would ever record.

However, I know quite well that a person could heard MJH playing "Mermaids" and easily assume that he was listening to "Train" ~ because I had that very experience myself.

Several years ago, I turned on the radio in the middle of a song and immediately thought "That sure sounds like Mississippi John; I didn't know he played 'Waitin' for a Train'!" (On that recording of "Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me," Hurt alternates sung verses with instrumental verses, and I had tuned in near the beginnning of a verse that he wasn't singing.) When the next repetition of the verse came around and the vocal part resumed, my guess as to the artist was verified ~ it was Hurt's voice, unmistakably ~ but the words were not what I expected.

Both John Hurt and Jimmie Rodgers lived in Mississippi at around the same time, but of course in vastly different "worlds." John Hurt lived much longer, of course, but I think they were more-or-less contemporaries back when both made their first recordings. Did one "steal" this melody from the other, or did both of them set lyrics to an existing "folk" melody? I'd like to believe the latter.

Jimmie Rodgers, "The Singing Brakeman," got around much more widely than John Hurt, who lived in relative isolation, never venturing far from his patch of sharecropped farmland except for two trips to make recordings ~ and then, many years later, touring as a "redicovered" star of the folk revival.

So Jimmie, the railroad man, had more chances to hear someone playing or singing a song learned from John Hurt "live" than for John to hear Jimmie's song in person. On the other hand, while both men made records, Jimmie's were much more widely known and distributed, so John might have been more likely to hear a Jimmie Rodgers i>record than for Jimmie to hear any of John's.