The train song CD

While I drove to and from the Dallas area this weekend (on a very nice visit to Ziactrice), I listened a lot to Lyle Lovett’s “Step Inside This House” CD. It’s a good soundtrack for driving through Texas, and particularly the blue highways like the FM 308 cutoff between Waco and Waxahachie.

And while I was listening to it, I wound up replaying “Train Ride,” the middle section of Steven Fromholz’s Texas Trilogy, several times.  It fitted into the feel of “going” very neatly, as I ran through a series of wide-spot communities that had been created by the I&GN railroad years ago. And that led me to thinking about making a custom CD of train songs from my audio library, so when I got home last night I started jotting down titles of selections I want to consider for the CD.  These are the ones I’ve come up with so far, in something close to the order I think I’d use them.

• Mason Williams, “Train Ride in G.”  This one has got to go on there, and it’s going to be the opener and maybe the closer as well.  I used to use it as the intro and outro for my radio show on KCOM, nearly thirty years ago, and it’s still as good as ever it was.
• Merle Travis, “Nine-Pound Hammer.”  Yeah, so maybe it’s a coal-mining song, strictly speaking, but it feels like a railroad song.
• Elvis, “Mystery Train.”  Junior Parker might have written it, but Elvis makes it mean something.
• Flatt and Scruggs, “Reuben’s Train.”  Earl was, in my opinion, the first banjo player who could make you hear a steam engine just by pickin’ it.
• Josh White, “Jim Crow.”  This is a Civil-Rights era set of lyrics put to the classic tune “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” not at all well-known.
• Elizabeth Cotten, “Freight Train.”  I don’t know which version of this I’ll use, but it needs to be by a woman.  Maybe I can borrow a copy of Cotten’s own recording from somebody.
• Johnny Cash, “Hey Porter.”  Except I’m going to use Ry Cooder’s version, because it’s the one I knew first and best.
• Guy Clark, “Texas, 1947.”  This is the other great Texas train song, along with Fromholz’s and Williams’s, although strictly speaking the latter is an instrumental, not a song.  (You didn’t know that Mason Williams was a Texan?  He was born in Abilene in the late 1930s.)
• Steven Fromholz, “Texas Trilogy:  Train Ride.”  I think I’ll end up using Lyle’s version of this one, rather than the original Frummox track.  I like Lyle’s instrumentation better.
• Butch Hancock, “Boxcars.”  I want Joe Ely’s cover, though.  The song needs the mean, lonesome feel that Joe gave it.
• Little Feat, “Two Trains.”  This one’s going to be hard to work into the sequence, but I think it’s supposed to be there anyway.
• Ervin Rouse, “Orange Blossom Special.”  I’m not sure whose take of this I’ll use; I might get out Johnny Cash’s.
• Josh White, “John Henry.”  I’ve heard many versions of this song, but this one stays with me.
• John Fahey, “Last Steam Engine Train.”  Except I want Leo Kottke’s cut of it.  It’s the same tune, but the two guitarists have wildly differing interpretations.  I can only explain it by the mental pictures it produces for me:  Fahey’s original makes me see a cabbage-stacked ten-wheeler huffing a milk train slowly along through a swampy Southern landscape, and Kottke’s produces a vision of a high-wheeled Mikado loping across a Minnesota prairie at the head end of a time freight.
• The Bad Livers, “Ghost Train.”  It ain’t any kind of traditional, but I like the Livers’ “thrash bluegrass” take of this classic.
• Roy Acuff, “Wabash Cannonball.”  I think for this one I’m gonna use the cut from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Circle sessions; it’s a slower instrumental version with “Bashful Brother Oswald” Kirby taking the lead on dobro.
• Steve Goodman, “City of New Orleans.”  I don’t know—this one may not make the cut.  It’s an excellent song of itself, but I can’t figure out where it goes in the sequence.
• Merle Travis, “Cannonball Rag.”  This one might not make the cut either; trying to call it a train song is a reeeeeeeeal stretch.  It may have to wait for the “Fingerpicking Favorites” CD that I’m also pondering.