I was invited to play on the press run of the Freedom Train in '75. Alan Kaufman the great fiddler, Nano Reilly, and I boarded the train at 8AM in Hoboken (an ungodly hour for a folksinger back then), and they put us in the press car with the free booze. This may have been their big mistake. I was sitting there loading up on Bloody Marys when the train PA started blasting the official Freedom Train song HERE COMES THE FREEDOM TRAIN, written by that great country songwriter Stephen H. Lemberg (who?), and recorded in Nashville by Porter Waggoner and the whole Tennessee Philharmonic. The anchorman from CBS News, who was sitting there listening to me play, well, we turned to look at each other and simultaneously said, "That's terrible!" I asked if he wanted to hear a real train song, and when he said he would, proceeded to sing Utah Phillips's song DADDY,WHAT'S A TRAIN?. He liked it so much that that evening while all the other networks were using the official song for the background music for the story, CBS used me. Needless to say I was never invited back to play for them again. But it was worth it just to be able to ride behind that gorgeous Nickel Plate locomotive up to Scranton, PA and back.

Mark Ross