LONG STEEL RAIL – The Railroad in American Folksong Cohen, Norm, University of Illinois Press, 1981, p 486-89.

Dummy Line – defined.

The term dummy line has several different meanings and likewise refers to several completely distinct songs. The Dictionary of American Slang glosses the term as a train carrying railroad employees. In Australia, according to A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English it meant the baggage car of a Melbourne tram. The Oxford English Dictionary cites an 1864 usage meaning a locomotive with water condensers, from which there was no noise of escaping steam. Folklorist Vance Randolph notes that in "the early days" the front part of California streetcars was open, and called the dummy. The standard references on railroad, hobo, and tramp slang to no mention the term.

Rail historian Archie Robertson suggested that the common version of this song originally referred to the one-mile-long Augusta Railroad of Augusta, Arkansas. This company was incorporated in 1918 to take over the assets and franchises of the insolvent August Tramway and Transfer Company. The latter railroad had been built in 1887 by the people of Augusta to give them a connection with the Saint Louis and Iron Mountain – under rather amusing circumstances. As Clifton E. Hull relates in his history Shortline Railroads of Arkansas, Hull accepts Robertson's attribution of "The Dummy Line" to the Augusta Railroad; this cannot be the origin of the verses, however, as fragments of the song were collected as early as 1913 by folklorist E.C. Perrow. An attribution to the earlier "Augusta Tramway and Transfer Company would be at least chronologically possible, but the geographical references in the text (see st. 1 of the version transcribed here) lend no support to this suggestion either; the one-mile-short-line is nowhere near Memphis or Saint Louis.

In the oldest text of "The Dummy Line" the word dummy is used in Randolph's sense – to mean part of a streetcar. Therefore it might not be considered a railroad song, although streetcars do run, literally, on rail roads. This song, obtained by Randolph in manuscript copy from and Arkansas woman, who heard it sung in the 1890's, appeared frequently in pocket songster of the 1880's. It can readily be identified by the chorus:

Riding on the dummy, glad to get a seat.
With a jolly company, all looking gay and sweet;
Riding on the dummy the dummy with the darling I adore,
Viewing hills and dales with joy I never felt before.

This song was published in 1885 by George W. Hagans of San Francisco under the title "Riding on the Dummy," with words and music credited to Sam Both and Frederick G. Carnes, respectively (copyrighted in 1885, no. 26351).

Quite different from the above are two other dummy songs. They share the same chorus, but the other stanzas are distinct. The less widely know one begins:

Across the prairie on a streak of rust,
There's something moving in a cloud of dust;
It crawls into the village with a wheeze and whine,
The two o'clock flyer on the dummy line.

Other stanzas elaborate on the image of the slow-moving railroad train.

The best-know dummy song, a representative version of which is transcribed here, seems to be more common in black than in white tradition. It is invariably coupled with additional, thematically unrelated verses that differ from one text to the next. The earliest recovered reported in print date from early in this century, but the an gauge and style of the verses coupled with the "dummy" stanzas invariably suggest an origin on the minstrel stage thirty or forty years earlier. This is the song referred to in all the bibliographic citations other than Ford, Randolph, and the second version in Harbin.

The first two stanzas and chorus of our version are the constant part of the various texts; the final stanza, reminiscent of "Casey Jones," does not occur elsewhere. Other verses generally supplement the two-stanza-plus-chorus "dummy" fragment with stanzas that have nothing to do with the railroad. For example, the version recorded by Robert N. Page includes these verses:

You oughta see my father's beard, how it grows,
The other day he went to shave and cut off his nose;
Slapped it on right upside down,
And every time it drizzles now my father nearly drowns.

I've got a brother by the name of Bill.
He was in the battle at Bunker Hill.
Fought a hard fight for a better life (?).
It's a blame sight harder where Bill is now.

I've got a gal down in Mobile.
She's got a face like a lemon peel.
She got a wart on the end of her chin.
She said it is a dimple, but a dimple turns in.

I have found only three 78 rpm commercial recordings of the dummy song. The version transcribed here was performed by the Pickard Family in 1930 for the American Record Corporation. The earliest recording, made in 1927 by Robert N. Page for the Victor Talking Machine Company, was one of two selections he recorded; it is not possible to determine from them whether he was black or white. The third item, made in 1949 by the Jester, is a version of the song given by Ford.

The 78 rpm discography also includes Uncle Dave Macon's parody on "The Dummy Line," a song about the automobile, and Vernon Dalhart's imitation of Uncle Dave Macon's recording made in 1926, predates both the Pickards' and Page's. One other 78 rpm hillbilly recording, "We're Riding on the Dummy Dummy Line," which Bill Cox cut in 1929 for the Starr Piano Company, was never released, and therefore it cannot be determined which dummy song it was.

A version a correspondent sent me several years ago is choice because of the inclusion of several railroad-related stanzas that are not widespread:

Well, a man was walking ahead the train.
Oh, the whistle blew and it blew again.
The feller hollered, "I don't care how much you blow.
I ain't a-comin' back because you're too darned slow."

There's a hobo got on the train one day,
Said he'd like to ride, but he couldn't pay.
The captain said, "According to the railroad law,
I'm gonna punch your ticket, or I'll punch your jaw."

Now the Dummy train met a cow one day.
She was standing right on the right of way.
Well, shovel in the water, boys, and give the coal.
The cow she went and skinned up a signal pole.

Down in Arkansaw, where the trains go slow,
There's a big tornado began to blow.
It blew so hard, it blew the Dummy off the track,
And then it turned around again and blew it back.

For the upper berth, there's a dollar due;
For a lower berth, well, they charge you two.
The upper berth is lower, and the lower's high.
We'll all be walking on our uppers by and by.

Your humble servant,
Gargoyle