From: LONG STEEL RAIL - The Railroad in American Folksong

Cohen, Norm, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1981, pp 478-484.

The Midnight Special (Pistol Pete's Midnight Special)

During the 1950's folksong revival, a favorite at hootenannies and concerts was this Texas prisoner's song. The Lomaxes wrote that the Midnight Special was the Golden Gate Limited, departing from Houston's Southern Pacific depot at midnight for San Antonio, El Paso, and points west. (1) Thirty miles out of Houston, the Midnight Special shone its light through the barred windows at the Texas state prison farm at Sugarland, reminding the inmates of the light and freedom on the other side of the prison walls. (2) In an engrossing examination titled "A Who's Who of "The Midnight Special,'" Texas folklorist Mack McCormick traced the individuals named in some versions of the song (especially Leadbelly's) to a 1923 incident. (3) Jack Smith, a bank robber sentenced to twenty-five years' hard labor, broke out of the Houston county jail while waiting for the transfer man, Uncle Bud Russell, who was due to arrive shortly to take him to the state penitentiary. Smith was captured a few hours later by Houston sheriff T.A. Binfor. Four other Houston law officers of that time were memorialized in one of Leadbelly's stanzas.

Bason an' Brock will arrest you,
Payton and Boone will take you down,
Oh, the judge will sentence you,
Penitentiary bound.(4)

McCormick's researches do not prove that the "The Midnight Special" originated at the time of this 1923 jailbreak. It seems more probable that Leadbelly and others set the details of that event into the framework of an earlier, well-established traditional song. The strongest evidence for this assumption is that the song appeared widely throughout the South within a very few years after 1923, and invariably in versions that did not mention any of the individuals associated with the Houston events of 1923.

That some elements of "The Midnight Special" are far older than the song as a whole is attested by verses Howard W. Odum printed in 1911:

Get up in mornin' when ding dong rings,
Look at table - see same damn things.<5>

The earliest reference to the song I have found was in a letter to Robert W. Gordon, then conducting the column "Old Songs That Men Have Sung" in Adventure magazine. Dated August 3, 1923, the letter requested additional verses of the song, and gave one verse ("If you go to the city, you better go right . . .") and chorus. Carl Sandburg published two variants in his 1927 anthology American Songbag, both without attribution. A frequent source of Sandburg's material was Robert W. Gordon's immense manuscript collection of folksongs, gathered during the several years' correspondence with readers in his column. Another of Gordon's correspondents, Terril McKay, sent Gordon a song he called simple "Jail Song" that he had heard several years earlier, in the fall of 1923, in the Harris County Jail in Houston. Except for a few adjustments in the use of dialect, and the change of Judge Robinson's name to Judge Nelson, this song is identical with one of the two that Sandburg printed )p.217). Gordon himself printed a fragment of the song in one of a series of columns on folksongs that he published in the New York times in 1927. In McKay's version, Sheriff Binford became T. Bentley.

The first commercial recording of "The Midnight Special" was made in 1926, by Dave Cutrell, with McGinty's Oklahoma Cowboy Band for the OKeh label, ..

The person most responsible for spreading the popularity of "The Midnight Special" was doubtless Huddie Leadbetter. "Leadbelly"..recorded the song several times in his career. The earliest was in July 1934 when John Lomax recorded him for the Library of Congress in the Louisiana State Prison Farm at Angola..

The "Midnight Special" tune is, in part, a variant of the 1900 ragtime pop tune "Creole Belles."

(1) John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, Folk Song: U.S.A. (New York; Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1947), p. 292.

(2) An alternative explanation for what the Midnight Special meant to prison inmates was offered by Carl F. Andre of Vicksburg, Miss., in a July 27, 1955, letter to Duncan Emrish, then head of the Library of Congress Archive of Folk Song: "As I got the story, a number of years back, convicts who had been outstanding during the week were rewarded on Sunday by a visit from Memphis prostitutes who boarded a train in Memphis at Midnight Saturday; hence the title of the song."

(3) Mack McCormick, "A Who's Who of "The Midnight Special,'"Caravan No. 19 (Jan., 1960).

(5) "Grade Song" in Howard W. Odum "Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes." JAF24 (Oct-Dec 1911, 382.

Sincerely,
Gargoyle