|
|||||||
Origins: The Wreck of No. 52 In Mudcat MIDIs: The Wreck of No. 52 |
Share Thread
|
Subject: Need title, please help From: GUEST,Cookie Date: 20 Jun 03 - 05:49 PM Would anyone know the title to this song??? It is very old. probably 1920's to 1940's. It is about kids? putting a spike on the railroad tracks, and a brave train engineer named Mr.Allen trying to save the train. Any help would be greatly appreciated. |
Subject: Lyr Add: THE WRECK OF NO. 52 From: masato sakurai Date: 20 Jun 03 - 08:26 PM The title is "The Wreck of No. 52," based on a 1933 railroad disaster. The version below is from Katie Letcher Lyle, Scalded to Death by the Steam (Algonquin Books of Chapell Hill, 1988, pp. 180-181). THE WRECK OF NO. 52 (Cliff Carlisle??) On a bright and sunny day, in the merry month of May, From Sanford a train pulled out on time, Was old No. 52, a freight that went on through, The fastest on the old Southern line. George Allen was the name of that engine of fame Who rode with that train that fated day, When he left his wife alone, and his wife there alone, He thought he'd return to her next day. The train was loaded down, with stock northern bound And little did they think they'd out delay, Oh, little did they know just what fate would bestow Before they had ever gone halfway. No one was to blame for the wrecking of that train But a little boy who was out at play, He put a spike on the rail; the next train could not fail To wreck that came along that way. Everyone knows the tale, how the train left the rail, And the cattle they were dying everywhere, Mr. Allen thought of home and his wife there alone When the steam from the engine filled the air. On his deathbed Allen lay from the burns he got that day, His wife and his children by his side, Then he heard the Master call, and he left them one and all, For Allen had taken his last ride. ~Masato Click to play |
Subject: RE: Need title, please help- kids & spike on RR tracks From: masato sakurai Date: 20 Jun 03 - 09:08 PM Written by Fred Richards & Tony Martin, w&m, 1933. Recorded by Fred Richards in 05/23/1933 as "Freight Wreck of Number 52," and by Cliff Carlisle in 07/26/1933 as "Wreck of Number 52." (Meade et al., Country Music Sources, p. 78) |
Subject: RE: Need title, please help- kids & spike on RR tracks From: GUEST,Cookie Date: 20 Jun 03 - 10:37 PM Thank you so much. You made my friend very happy. He remembered this from his childhood but couldn't remember the name of it. Have a nice weekend. |
Subject: RE: THE WRECK OF NO. 52- kids & spike on RR tracks From: Joe Offer Date: 11 Feb 04 - 02:57 AM I added a tune to this one. |
Subject: RE: THE WRECK OF NO. 52- kids & spike on RR tracks From: masato sakurai Date: 11 Feb 04 - 05:59 AM Cliff Carlisle's 'Wreck Of No. 52' [audio] is at The Record Lady's All-Time Country Favorites (REQUESTS PAGE SEVEN). |
Subject: RE: THE WRECK OF NO. 52- kids & spike on RR tracks From: Uncle_DaveO Date: 11 Feb 04 - 09:33 AM Joe Offer: Seems clear that this would go nicely to "The Wreck of the Old 97". I'd be interested in hearing what tune you added. That might make it possible to use both this one and "97" on my projected all-railroad CD. Dave Oesterreich |
Subject: #52 From: Joe Offer Date: 11 Feb 04 - 12:22 PM Hi, Dave - I guess I should have explained myself. When I add tunes, I put MIDI links with the lyrics and on the top of the thread. Click, and ye shall find. -Joe- |
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: The Wreck of No. 52 From: GUEST,Blues Moon Radio Date: 21 Feb 18 - 12:45 PM Hi, this is a great site - I'm bookmarking it - I have that song and want to play it in conjunction with the anniversary of the tragedy on my radio show - glad to learn from this page that it was in 1933 - but wonder if my fellow Blues scholars might know the location of the wreck and the actual date, please? Thanks so much... info appreciated! Sincerely, Clair DeLune, Professor of Blues History; author of South Carolina Blues; and host of Blues Moon Radio on wusc.sc.edu since 1990 I welcome your insights and links to news stories of the event (which I could not uncover, so hoping y'all might!) clearbluesday at yahoo dot com |
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: The Wreck of No. 52 From: Joe Offer Date: 22 Feb 18 - 02:34 AM Here's the Cliff Carlisle recording of The Wreck of Number 52: This one might have a little better quality, but may not play in all nations: The lyrics Masato posted above from Scalded to Death by the Steam are apparently a transcription of the Cliff Carlisle recording. Here are the notes from the Scalded book, page 181: There is not much new about the song. Carlisle continues to depend on the tried-and-true formula. The poem has one slightly more sophisticated characteristic than most: there is internal rhyme in the first and third line of each stanza, as if modeled on the ballad "Jesse James," whose tune it fits. The errors in rhythm, the extra syllables or syllables omitted, are puzzling; it would have been so simple to rewrite the lines slightly for accurate rhythm. The only conclusion is that this song, and others like it, were composed hastily and carelessly for an uncritical public. Newspaper sources were the Atlanta Journal, 24-30 Aug. 1908; The Danville Bee, 4 May 1933; Richmond Times-Dispatch, 4 May 1933 and 6 May 1933. Great thanks to Norm Cohen, who provided me with a tape of the recording by Carlisle of "The Wreck of No. 52," and to my friend Hugh Agee of Athens, Georgia, who sent me the clippings from the Atlanta Journal. Thanks also to Norm Cohen for putting me in touch with Eugene Wiggins of Dahlonega, Georgia, and to Gene Wiggins, who sent me information about Ben Dewberry, and to Robert D. Jacobs and Sidney A. Dewberry of Atlanta for their help, and to Shelby F. Lowe of Douglasville, Georgia, for a picture. Pick Temple recalls a childhood incident that shows the universality of boys' putting objects on the tracks. He and a couple of friends one day went up past Mt. Royal Station in Baltimore and "climbed a fence and sat on a grassy slope looking down at the trains in the maze of tracks north of the station. The grass sloped down to the top of a stone wall where we stood and looked down about six or eight feet to the tracks, with a stream of water trickling by in a ditch. There was the Third Rail, guarded by a sort of wooden trough, open at the top so the shoes of the electric locos could slide along them. We found a piece of wire, a sort of hoop from an old barrel, and tossed it down on the tracks to see what it would do. It landed on the Third Rail and, at the same time, partly in the trickle of water running beside the tracks. It sizzled and popped and sparked and scared us half to death. We thought we had shorted out the entire railroad and stopped every train for miles in each direction! Of course we hadn't, but we felt responsible. I climbed down the wall and kicked the wire off the rail, thus allowing the B & O to function again!" Lyle's Law states that once learned, or heard of, a new word or fact will be encountered again within a very short time, On the day after I was writing this essay, Friday, July 9, 1982, the Roanoke Times reported an incident in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, in which five teenagers were charged with tripping a switch that sent a commuter train roaring into a factory, killing the engineer and critically injuring a passenger. Responses to requests for information of this wreck came from David Luther, my dear mother-in-law Frances S. Lyle, Adelle Clement, Chris Sutphin, Mrs. Donald Breedlove, and the people mentioned in the article. My special thanks to Elizabeth Rice of Danville for the photograph of No. 52, and to Marvin Black of Greensboro, North Carolina, for his loan of the photograph of Ben Dewberry's wrecked engine. Proving that these old wreck songs still have viability, Willie 'n' Waylon's "Luckenbach, Texas," contains the line: "Between Hank Williams' pain songs, and Dewberry's train songs. . ." |
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: The Wreck of No. 52 From: Joe Offer Date: 22 Feb 18 - 02:56 AM Mudcatter Janie took me to Danville, Virginia, last year - on September 22, to be exact. We went to the site of the Wreck of the Old 97, and we saw a lot of stuff about the Old 97 at the city visitor center and an Old 97 mural on a wall downtown - but nothing about the Number 52. Scalded to Death by the Steam (by Katie Letcher Lyle, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991) cites newspaper articles from May 4 and 6, 1933, so the wreck must have happened within a few days before May 4. In his Long Steel Rail (page 182), Norm Cohen says that Cliff Carlisle wrote "The Wreck of the Number 52," but that's all Cohen has to say about the song. Note that Cohen provided the information Katie Letcher Lyle used in Scalded to Death by the Steam. -Joe- |
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: The Wreck of No. 52 From: Joe Offer Date: 22 Feb 18 - 03:23 AM The front page of the Danville (VA) Bee for May 4, 1933, is here: It's a long article. The grammar leaves something to be desired and I'm not going to try to correct it, but this is a terrific piece of writing. I'll transcribe it, but I'll have to do it a bit at a time because it's a very long article: WRECK REPORTED CAUSED BY CHILD |
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: The Wreck of No. 52 From: Joe Offer Date: 23 Feb 18 - 12:11 AM Despite grammatical shortcomings, I think the newspaper account is a great story. It was a hell of a lot of typing, so I hope somebody will read it. Now, the song says the engineer died from injuries from the wreck, but that wasn't stated in this newspaper The Danville Bee for May 5, 1933, said the engineer had taken a turn for the worse, but the fireman was expected to live. The May 6 Bee said a 7-year-old boy named Junior Cardwell admitted placing a spike on the rails to flatten it whild two other boys looked on to see what would happen. No warrants were issued, but the boys were being given a whipping. Here's another article from the Danville Bee May 6, 1933: ALLEN DIES OF SCALDING WRECK STEAM |
Subject: RE: Lyr Req: The Wreck of No. 52 From: GUEST,joe at library Date: 24 Feb 18 - 07:46 PM I finished the article about the death of the engineer, and then moved it up above. I hope people will take a look at it. It's a terrific story. -Joe- |
Subject: RE: Origins: The Wreck of No. 52 From: GUEST,GUEST Date: 12 Sep 19 - 01:14 AM https://www.ebay.com/itm/1933-Photo-Junior-Cardwell-Stacey-NC-Railroad-Track-Train-Flattened-Wreck/153610049069?hash=item23c3df562d:g:By4AAOSwI9ddc0-7 |
Subject: RE: Origins: The Wreck of No. 52 From: Mrrzy Date: 12 Sep 19 - 11:54 AM Thanks for all that typing, Joe! |
Share Thread: |
Subject: | Help |
From: | |
Preview Automatic Linebreaks Make a link ("blue clicky") |