Little Robyn, much respect about your point.

I suppose that it is possible that the line "people come and the train done gone" does refer to the underground railroad. However, I'm reluctant to say that it definitely does, partly because it seems that everytime "train" is mentioned in a 19th cebtury Black spiritual or 19th century Black gospel song folks think that it must refer to the underground railroad.

I'm not saying that in this instance, it's not true [that train=underground railroad], but I think that we should keep an open mind about whether it does or does not mean this.

{Btw, Little Robyn, "we" here refers to those of us who are activing participating in this discussion, and those who are reading this discussion}.

In other Mudcat threads, I've mentioned that I think that it's much too simplistic to think that enslaved African American routinely used a number of coded words such as 'train' in songs to signal that an individual or group of people were getting ready to flee slavery. I have also mentioned before that I think such a theory insults the intelligence of White folks hearing these songs, and disregards and minimizes the possibility [probability] that there would be some Black snitches who heard these songs, "got" their hidden meanings and then would have ratted on these people.

It's my position that a word can have multiple meanings in the same song, at the same time, and/or at different times. So the word "train" in an African American spiritual could [can]refer to the underground railroad. And/or the word "train" could [can] refer to the gospel train and folks needing to "get right" before they met their maker [as one never knew when the train was going to come and it might "leave them behind" to elude to a fragment from the foremost spiritual song [that I remember anyway] "Git On Board, Little Children".

To clarify my theory about the connection between the line "people come but-oh excuse me-people come and the train done gone" and the Great Migration, it's also possible that the word train might refer to that migration of Black folks from the South to the Midwest and the North [in the years 1915-1926 or thereabouts]. But I think that the word allude is more probable than the word 'refer'. What I mean by this is that I believe that it's possible that the composer[s] of this line borrowed the imagery of the crowded train stations and missed trains and added it to an already existing spiritual.