Lyr. Add: WAITING FOR A TRAIN
Jimmie Rodgers, 1928

All around the water tank, waitin' for a train,
A thousand miles away from home, sleeping in the rain;
I walked up to a brakeman to give him a line of talk,
He says, "If you've got money, I'll see that you don't walk."
"I haven't got a nickel, not a penny can I show."
"Get off, get off, you railroad bum," he slammed the boxcar do'.

Yodel

He put me off in Texas, a state I dearly love,
The wide-open spaces all around me, the moon and stars up above;
Nobody seems to want me, or lend me a helping hand,
I'm on my way from Frisco, I'm going back to Dixie land;
Though my pocketbook is empty, and my heart is full with pain,
I'm a thousand miles away from home, just waiting for a train.

Yodel

With music, pp. 356-357, Norm Cohen, 1981, "Long Steel Rail," Univ. Illinois Press.
A study in progress by Dr, D. K. Wilgus of UCLA is mentioned by Cohen.
An English broadside, "Standing on the Platform," may be an ancestor. Re-compositions of this ballad seem to have been popular in the 1870s-1900 (Cohen, p. 357).