John Cannon
Thomas Leathers
John Luther
Jones 
"We're gonna reach Frisco, but we'll all be dead!"
"Casey Jones" by the American Quartet, Fiddlin' John Carson, Carl Sandburg, Eddy Arnold, & Johnny Cash
"Steamboat Bill" by Arthur Collins
"Waiting For The Robert E. Lee" by the Heidelberg Quintette, Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, & Louis Jordan
"Casey Jones Went Down On The Robert E. Lee" by Arthur Collins & Byron G. Harlan.
"Casey Bill" by Earl McDonald's Original Louisville Jug Band
"Kassie Jones" by Furry Lewis
"Knockin' Down Casey Jones" by Wilmer Watts and The Lonely Eagles
"Southern Casey Jones" by Jesse James
"Freight Train Boogie" by the Delmore Brothers
"Casey Jones (The Union Scab)" by Pete Seeger
"Talkin' Casey" by Mississippi John Hurt
"Casey Jones" by the Grateful Dead
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band & Joan Baez.
|
John Cannon
|
Thomas Leathers
|
John Luther
Jones
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Thomas Leathers, John Cannon, and John Luther Jones all grew up in Kentucky in the nineteenth century. Leathers and Cannon, born in the first half of the century, were contemporaries and rivals. Jones, a younger man by several decades, never knew Leathers or Cannon. Their respective exploits were to make an enduring impact on American popular song, where their paths would cross in legend as they never did in real life. Here's how it happened.
The biggest news on the Mississippi River in 1870 was the race between The Natchez and The Robert E. Lee, the two fastest riverboats anyone had ever seen. Their captains, Thomas Leathers and John Cannon respectively, were fierce competitors. Politics played a part; Leathers had sided with the Confederacy during the War Between the States, while Cannon had been a Union man, which didn't prevent him from naming his boat after the great Confederate general. But the real issue between them was the question of whose boat was fastest. On the Fourth of July, they, and the rest of the country, had their answer. The Robert E. Lee made the run between New Orleans and St. Louis in 3 days, 18 hours, and 14 minutes -- nearly six hours ahead of The Natchez.
The Robert
E. Lee 
St. Louis July 4, 1870
The race between The Lee and The Natchez really signalled the beginning of the end of an era for the Mississippi riverboat. Railroads had already supplanted the steamboat as the most efficient way of moving people and freight around the country -- they were faster, and not dependent on the course of a river in their choice of destinations. But railroads came to symbolize westward expansion. Riverboats signified the South, and The Robert E. Lee became one of the most compelling symbols of the antebellum South. Its achievement was still sufficiently memorable four decades later to inspire a hit song, which in turn spawned at least two followup songs that linked the riverboat to a famous railroad train and its engineer.
In the predawn hours of April 30, 1900, an Illinois Central train known as the Cannonball Express smashed into another train near Vaughan, Mississippi. This event inspired a song that Carl Sandburg called "the greatest ballad ever composed on the North American continent." That song was, of course, "Casey Jones," named after the engineer who died in the crash.
Jones, then as now, was a pretty common name, and being John Jones must have seemed rather undistinguished. So John Luther Jones took the nickname of "Cayce," from his hometown of Cayce, Kentucky. Newspapermen reporting on the wreck of the Cannonball Express, relying on oral statements from Illinois Central officials, got the spelling wrong, and the change stuck. For the past century, he's been known as Casey Jones.
Born in 1863, Jones worked his way up the ladder of railroad jobs, from janitor to engineer, joining Illinois Central in 1890. Shortly after midnight on April 30, Casey and his fireman Sim Webb boarded the Cannonball Express in Memphis, headed for Canton, Mississippi, on the way to New Orleans. Determined to make up time despite inclement weather, Casey poured on the steam. Rounding a sharp curve just north of Vaughan, Webb saw a red light indicating the presence of another train, whose caboose and three freight cars were backed up from the sidetrack directly in Casey's path. Webb shouted a warning, and Casey yelled for him to jump. Those were his last words. Webb jumped free; there were several injuries in the wreck, but Casey was the only fatality. Contemporary accounts agreed that the flagmen at Vaughan had taken numerous steps to warn oncoming trains of the obstruction on the track, which led to the obvious conclusion that the blame for the wreck rested squarely with the engineer, Casey Jones. But, as the saying goes, when the facts conflict with the legend, print the legend. Thus "Casey Jones (The Brave Engineer)."
The origin of the song is complex, and a matter of some controversy. An African-American engine wiper named Wallace Saunders is often credited with composing the first paean to Casey Jones, but no written versions of that song have been found, and there is some question as to whether Saunders' song bears any relationship to any of the songs with which we are now familiar. The two Casey Jones songs I know by African-American artists who were old enough to have heard both Saunders' song (assuming it existed) and "Casey Jones (The Brave Engineer)" both vary significantly from the latter song in terms of melody, and their lyrics connect only haphazardly.
Whatever its origin, one or more musical tributes to Casey Jones song kicked around the south for several years. A poem in ten stanzas, apparently unattributed, was first published in the May, 1908, issue of Railroad Man's Magazine, and these verses form the basis for what has come to be the standard version of the song. The first verse begins with a variant of the common folk trope "come all ye" -- "Come all you rounders," in this case. "Rounder" has several different connotations, most of them amounting to "neer-do-well," although the OED also cites "transient railway worker" as one meaning. After introducing Casey Jones (himself described as a rounder) as the song's protagonist, the stage is set. Casey is summoned by his boss, kisses his wife goodbye, and makes a cryptic comment about a "trip to the holy land." He boards his train in Memphis, where several weeks of rain have left the tracks "like the bed of a creek." Slowed by the water, Casey's train is running eight hours late. Two verses suggest that Casey is optimistic about making up time, but by the seventh verse, trouble looms: another train is dead ahead. Casey throws the engine into reverse and rings the alarm bell. The fireman jumps but Casey stays at the throttle, and dies for his pains. Casey is eulogized in the ninth verse, while the final verse outlines the travails of the railroading profession.
Within two years, a pair of vaudeville performers named T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton discovered the verses and claimed them as their own. Seibert, the lyricist, transferred the scene of the crash to northern California, adding lines about "the Western mail," "Frisco" and "the Reno Hill." He also added a dubious (and libelous) final verse in which the newly widowed Mrs. Jones comforts her childeren by saying "Go to bed children and hush you're cryin' / Cause you've got another papa on the Salt Lake Line." (As we will see, a final, frivolous verse in which the surviving widow and/or children joke about the death of the protagonist became a traditional ending for songs in the "Casey Jones" cycle.) Seibert and Newton also added the chorus, in which key lines from the preceding verse are echoed behind a chant of "Casey Jones."
The
Seibert-Newton version of "Casey Jones"
proved enormously popular among vaudevillians, and it was recorded in 1910 by
the American Quartet, featuring lead tenor Billy Murray. The
American Quartet's recording held down the number one spot on the sales charts
for eleven weeks during the summer of 1910, and was the best selling record
of the year. Murray -- who, both as a solo artist and with various groups including
the American Quartet, was far and away the most popular recording artist between
1903 and 1919 -- also recorded the song without the backing of the Quartet;
released under his own name, it reached number three on the charts. (Imagine
Paul McCartney recording a solo version of "Hey Jude" in 1968, and releasing
it to compete with the Beatles' version!) The song charted again in December,
1910, in a version by Arthur Collins and Byron G. Harlan. Collins
and his sometime partner Harlan were also among the most popular recording artists
of the first two decades of the twentieth century. They specialized in minstrel-type
numbers, frequently sung in dialect, and often inserted bits of comic dialogue
into their songs.
Arthur
Collins had a solo recording career that began in 1899. In 1911, he
recorded "Steamboat Bill," a tall tale about a
riverboat captain who died trying to break the record of The Robert E. Lee.
The song peaked at number 2 on the charts in the summer of that year. Opening
with sound effects (no mean feat in the pre-electronic recording era, when performers
sang or played into a horn, and sound was etched by a needle into tinfoil or
some other medium), "Steamboat Bill" tells the story of the captain of The
Whipoorwill: "The owners gave him orders on the strict QT / To try and beat
the record of The Robert E. Lee." Alas, the boiler bursts, and Bill perishes
in the attempt. The song is played for laughs all the way through. Bill's last
words were a wager (with a professional gambler who happened to be on board)
about who'd be blown higher. As with "Casey Jones," "Steamboat Bill" ends with
a flippant remark from the new widow: "Said she to the children, 'Bless each
Honey Lamb, / The next papa that you have will be a railroad man.'"
One of the groups which featured Billy Murray was the Heidelberg Quintette. In the autumn of 1912, they occupied the number one spot on the hit parade for six weeks with "Waiting For The Robert E. Lee." I don't own a copy of that record, but I did find a version on the web. Try http://www.bol.net/overseer5/waiting.html Other versions that enjoyed success at the time were by Collins & Harlan (peaking at number 3) and Dolly Connolly (number 4).
I wonder whether the mention of The Robert E. Lee in "Steamboat Bill" inspired the composition of"Waiting For The Robert E. Lee. ." Nostalgia for Dixie -- the mythical South -- was a recurrent theme on the pop charts in the early years of the twentieth century, and any variation on a popular theme would have been grist for the mill of Tin Pan Alley. This song doesn't deal in history, and no mention is made of the race with The Natchez. Instead, it's an idealized (from the white point of view, of course) picture of the Old South, with happy blacks "shufflin' along" the levee, waiting for the famous riverboat to arrive. The lyrics took some liberties with geography, locating the levee "in old Alabammy." I suppose "Alabammy" was as good a southern signifier as any, and offered more rhyming opportunities than "Mississippi" or "Luzianna" would have. (As we shall see, this is only the beginning of the geographical gaffes committed by those who were moved to sing about The Robert E. Lee.) The song's composers, L. Wolfe Gilbert (words) & Lewis F. Muir (music), touted it to vaudeville star Al Jolson, who included it in his 1912 stage revue The Whirl Of Society. Jolson had begun making records in 1912, but he didn't bother recording this song for another 35 years, after his career was resuscitated with the release of the movie The Jolson Story. I don't have that record either, worse luck. But I can get you close to what it might have sounded like.
This
selection is a transcript from Philco Radio Time (March 5, 1947), featuring
Al Jolson and Bing Crosby. (Philco Radio Time, Crosby's
weekly vehicle, was the first major network radio show that was prerecorded,
rather than being done live at the time of broadcast. Jolson was a frequent
guest star on this progam, and transcriptions of several shows still survive.)
Here's
another version of "Waiting For The Robert E. Lee," recorded
by Louis Jordan in 1939, a couple of years before he began dominating
the charts with the music that helped invent rhythm and blues. Among other things,
it illustrates that black artists were willing to record material that would
be considered racist today.
As noted above, Arthur Collins was often joined in best selling duets by Byron G. Harlan. Harlan specialized in sentimental ballads as a solo act, but with Collins he played the fool, shouting comic interjections which, from my perspective, quickly grow tiresome. Ragtime-era audiences clearly felt otherwise, though, as Collins & Harlan were consistent hitmakers from 1901-1918.
Collins
& Harlan's "Casey Jones Went Down On The Robert
E. Lee" was an early answer song released in 1912. Answer songs are
songs that piggyback on the success of a hit, building on the story, or presenting
the narrative from another point of view. "Casey Jones Went Down On The Robert
E. Lee," of course, actually answers two songs. According to Joel Whitburn's
Pop Memories, the most authoritative (and just about the only) source
of information on record sales in the early days of sound recordings, "Casey
Jones Went Down On The Robert E. Lee" didn't chart. The only discographical
information I have is that it was recorded in 1912, presumably late in the year
as a followup to their version of "Waiting For the Robert E. Lee." I'd speculate
that it might have been a flip side (two sided records having been introduced
by Columbia in 1908), but "Waiting For The Robert E. Lee" was released
on an Edison cylinder (one of the new Edison Amberol "unbreakable" cylinders
of blue wax), so it couldn't have had a flip side. At any rate, the melody of
the answer song had echoes of "Waiting For the Robert E. Lee," and the lyrics
insisted that Casey was an engineer on the steamboat rather than on a train:
"He was an engineer upon that riverboat / Not upon the railroad as the poets
wrote." Poor Casey was still doomed to a tragic end, however, as the riverboat
sank, just as surely as the train crashed.
When record companies discovered, in the mid-1920s, that there was a market for music by rural musicians, the Casey Jones saga was recorded by both black and white artists. Along the way, it got mixed up with the story of Steamboat Bill and The Robert E. Lee.
Fiddlin'
John Carson was one of the very first white rural artists to make commercial
recordings. Based in Atlanta, Carson played in the streets for tips, and in
1923 had been sufficiently popular to have performed on local radio. Dubious
northern record executives were shocked when his first record ("The Little
Old Log Cabin In the Land" b/w "The Old Hen Cackled And the Rooster's
Going To Crow") quickly sold out, and they lost little time in bringing
him to New York to record a dozen more songs in November, 1923. One of these
was "Casey Jones." Carson's rendition,
his own scratchy vocal with fiddle accompaniment, initially followed the Seibert/Newton
version closely, but by the middle of the song he was interpolating variant
verses. After the fatal crash, for example, "Casey went to heaven, went
straight from here. / He told St. Peter, he's a brave engineer. / St. Peter
says 'Well you're lookin' mighty bold. / I guess I'll have to put you back to
shovelin' coal.'" Carson was clearly having trouble with his breathing
pattern by the time he got to the chorus, having to swallow the word "Casey"
to catch his breath. Halfway through, he drops the chorus altogether until the
end of the song, and simply goes straight from one verse to the next. He ends
the song with the Widow Jones comforting her children with the strange assertion
that "You got another daddy on the Po-lice Board."
One
of the earliest recorded African-American forays into the Casey Jones saga was
a song called "Casey Bill" by Earl
McDonald's Original Louisville Jug Band, recorded in 1927. Jug band
music seems to have evolved in Louisville around the turn of the century, with
someone blowing over the neck of a jug to create a combination bass/percussion
effect. McDonald's outfit was the first in the genre to record. The title of
this song really should have been "Casey and Bill," since that's how the lyrics
go. "Casey Bill" was an answer to Arthur Collins' "Steamboat Bill," using that
song's melody. In this version of the story, Casey Jones' train was running
parallel to the Mississippi River one day when it came upon the riverboat piloted
by Steamboat Bill. Bill challenged Casey to a race, and they both took off to
see whether it would be a train or a riverboat that actually broke the record
of The Robert E. Lee. A dead heat turns into disaster at a drawbridge
when the bridge raises high enough to derail Casey's train, but not high enough
to permit Bill's boat to pass. Both men perish in the crash. This song is clearly
a tall tale, so the frivolity of the final verse seems less out of place here
than it did in "Casey Jones": "The little kids didn't seem to bother
/ When someone told them that they'd lost their father. / One said to the other
'Don't cry and fret. / We don't need no daddy -- Ma's a sufferagette!'"
Furry Lewis, a Memphis-based blues singer, recorded a two part "Kassie
Jones" in 1928. Lewis's song is said to be based on two older songs:
an African-American railroading song called "Charley Snyder" (with which I am
unfamiliar) and "Jay Gould's Daughter," (with its verse about "one more
road that I'd like to ride.") "Kassie Jones" thus has both a different
tune and different lyrics than the Seibert-Newton version of the Casey Jones
saga. Lewis's song is a series of thirteen loosely connected verses, most (but
not all) of which mention Casey. The final verse, for instance, begins "I left
Memphis to spread the news / Memphis women don't wear no shoes," and concludes
with a boast about the singer's ability to avoid work. Lewis's record sold fewer
than 5,000 copies in its day, although it has been frequently anthologized,
beginning with Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology Of American Folk Music in
1958.
A
rural white string band from coastal North Carolina known as Wilmer Watts
& The Lonely Eagles stayed closer to the American Quartet's version of the
song in their "Knockin' Down Casey Jones," recorded
in 1929. My initial notes for a commentary on this song made reference to "sawing
fiddles," but a closer listen indicated that there weren't any. It's the
kind of song that sounded like there should have been fiddles, though.
The arrangement, with guitars, banjo, and untrained voices, places the song
squarely in the proto-country genre. Watts and his band repeat an error that
many of their predecessors and successors made. In introducing the song's protagonist,
they state "Casey Jones was the rounder's name / On a six-eight wheeler, he
won his fame." According to Norm Cohen's liner notes for the CD compilation
Mystery Train: Classic Railroad Songs Vol. 2, "there never was such a
wheel combination" in the history of railroading.
"Southern
Casey Jones" was recorded in 1936, by
a black man named Jesse James. Like his namesake, James occasionally
found himself on the wrong side of the law. He did his recording while out of
prison on parole, and only recorded four songs as a solo artist. His label,
Decca, chose not to release any of them during his lifetime. James was a hoarse-voiced
piano player; Greil Marcus called him a "black Jerry Lee Lewis." James's
"Southern Casey Jones" is connected, both in terms of musical structure
and lyrics, with Furry Lewis's "Kassie Jones" -- a big beat version
of that song. Ironically, for a song entitled "Southern Casey Jones,"
James sets the story on a run from Cincinnati to Newport News. His Casey is
a rounder indeed. Most of the song deals with the aftermath of Casey's death.
A flock of female admirers dress in red and form a ceremonial procession at
his funeral. Casey's widow gets not one, but two, opportunities to display her
indifference to the death of her husband: "Little girl say 'Mama, is that
a fact, / Papa got killed on the IC track?' / 'Yes, yes honey, but hold your
breath. / Get that money from your daddy's death.'" Later in the song,
her son poses the same question, and is admonished to "'Quit cryin' boy,
and don't do that. / You got another daddy on the same damn track.'"
In
1946, the Delmore Brothers released "Freight Train
Boogie," which peaked at number 2 on Billboard's Country charts.
The Delmores helped pioneer the effort to bring boogie woogie rhythm to country
music; on this recording, their voices and guitars are joined by Jethro (of
the country music comedy team Homer and Jethro) Burns on electric guitar and
Wayne Raney on harmonica. With Raney's harmonica mimicing a train whistle, the
brothers proclaim that "Casey Jones was a mighty man / But now he's restin'
in the promised land. / The kind of music he could understand / Was a eight
wheel driver under his command. / He made the freight train boogie -- all the
time. / He made the freight train boogie as it rolled down the line." Aside
from identifying Casey's musical preferences, "Freight Train Boogie" didn't
add much to the saga, but it's a good song with a bouncy beat.
In
1950, Carl Sandburg was 72 years old, and a respected figure in American
letters. A folklorist as well as an historian and poet, he recorded an album's
worth of songs for the fledgling Folklyric label that year. One of them was
"Casey Jones." Sandburg's version, in which he
accompanied himself on guitar, was slow and contemplative. It was also short
-- only three verses, clocking in at 1:27. Interestingly enough, his final verse
impugns Mrs. Jones in a different way than the standard Seibert-Newton version.
Sandburg has the Jones children calling "'Mama, mama, mama, have you heard the
news / Daddy got killed on the C-B and Qs.'" Mrs. Jones replies "'Shut your
eyes and hold your breath. / We'll all draw a pension on papa's death.'" These
last two lines echo a passage in the eleventh verse of Furry Lewis's "Kassie
Jones."
In
1955, leftist folk singer Pete Seeger put a different spin on the story
in a song entitled "Casey Jones (The Union Scab)."
In Seeger's version of the story, Casey is a Southern Pacific engineer who refuses
to join his fellow workers in a strike. He gets his comeuppance in the fabled
train wreck, and when he gets to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter informs him that
the angels are on strike, and that he can have a job singing if he wants it.
Scab to the core, Casey accepts, but is soon thrown out of heaven by a band
of militant angels and winds up shoveling sulphur for the Devil. "That's what
you get," Seeger proclaims, "for scabbin' on the SP line."
In
1956, Eddy Arnold was completing a ten year run as country music's most
popular recording artist. His label, RCA, eager to appeal to a younger generation
of record buyers, had just signed a kid named Elvis Presley, whose country-pop-r&b
hybrid was about to revolutionize both rural (country) and urban (pop) white
music. Arnold was a smoother singer than most of his country contemporaries.
If he wasn't yet the crossover artist he would become in the 1960s, he still
had less of the rural southern twang in his voice than, say, Hank Williams or
Lefty Frizzell. Arnold's version of "Casey Jones" may
have been an attempt to add the new rockabilly rhythm to his repertoire. The
record peaked at #15, which meant it was, by his standards, an abysmal failure.
But it's a nice version of the song, sticking pretty closely to the original
American Quartet arrangement. He addresses the song to "all you rounders," but
he drops the dubious "another papa on the Salt Lake Line" finish in favor of
the more comforting (and more appropriate, whatever the truth about Mrs. Jones'
marital arrangements may have been) "Go to bed children and stop you're cryin'
/ Cause your daddy's ridin' on that heavenly line."
By
1962, Johnny Cash, who (like Elvis) had started out on Sun Records) was
recording for Columbia. That year, he put together a concept album of songs
about working men called Blood, Sweat And Tears. "Casey
Jones" was one of the tracks. Cash's version of the song follows the
1908 Railroad Man's Magazine version more closely than most, and he mentions
the fireman, Sim Webb, by name. He has Casey boarding the train in Memphis and
roaring into northern Mississippi, and he includes the lines "Everybody knew
by the engine's moan / That the man at the throttle was Casey Jones." (This,
as it happens, was probably true. Engineers in those days were permitted to
customize their whistles pretty much at will, and Casey is said to have had
a distinctive six note blast.) He also makes effective use of the flawed final
verse of the 1908 version. The original read: "Headaches and heartaches
and all kinds of pain, /Are not apart from a railroad train. / Tales that are
in earnest, noble and grand, / Belong to the life of a railroad man." The
promising first line is compromised by the clumsy second. Instead, Cash sings:
"Headaches and heartaches and all kinds of pain /Are all a part of a railroad
train. / Sweat and toil, the good and the grand / Are part of the life of a
railroad man."
Mississippi
John Hurt began his recording career in 1928. By the mid-1930s, the Depression
had pretty well killed off the market for country blues recordings, and Hurt
faded into obscurity. He was rediscovered by young white blues afficianodoes
in the early 1960s, and made several records during that decade. Among the last
tracks he recorded before his death in 1966 was a rambling song called
"Talking Casey," released on Today!.
Despite its title, "Talking Casey" isn't a traditional
talking blues. Instead, it's a song in which Hurt simply talks, and lets his
guitar echo some of his words, or make train sounds. The story begins with Casey's
wife begging him not to leave. He boards the train anyway, and soon encounters
some sheep on the track. Speeding to make up lost time, he wrecks the train.
The song ends with Hurt and his guitar alternately voicing "Oh Lord have
mercy" and "Save me Lord."
Say
the phrase "Casey Jones" to anyone under forty, and the likelihood is that they'll
associate it with the Grateful Dead, who used the title for the anchor
track on their Workingman's Dead album, released in 1970. The album was
a breakthrough for the Dead in many ways, as it was their first to focus on
real songs, rather than on extended instrumental improvisation. This particular
"Casey Jones" was written by Robert Hunter and
Jerry Garcia. Apart from using the title character and a railroad setting, the
song bears little resemblance to the traditional versions of the Casey Jones
saga. Hunter's lyrics, as usual, manage to be both evocative and inscrutable
at the same time. Is the "Lady in Red" meant to evoke John Dillinger's nemisis?
Was it a slang term for some controlled substance? Beats me. But drugs are an
explicit part of the song's chorus: "Ridin' that train, high on cocaine
/ Casey Jones you better watch your speed. / Trouble ahead, trouble behind,
/ And you know that notion just crossed my mind."
The Robert E. Lee surfaced one last time (so far, anyway) in Joan
Baez's 1971 version of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie
Down." The song was written by Robbie Robertson, and first recorded by
The Band on their fine second album, The Band, in 1969. There,
Robertson's song is sung by drummer Levon Helm in the voice of Virgil Kane,
a Confederate veteran beaten down by the Northern carpetbaggers and scalawags
of the Reconstruction era. Virgil catches a glimpse of Robert E. Lee -- the
general, not the steamboat -- and the sight of his defeated hero is the last
straw. "You can take what you need and leave the rest," he says to his Yankee
listeners, "but you should never have taken the very best." When Joan Baez recorded
the song a couple of years later, she misheard a couple of its lines. It was
"Stoneman's cavalry," not "so much cavalry," that came and tore up the railroad
tracks near Danville, Virginia, in the spring of 1865. Danville was a major
railhead and supply center for the Confederacy, through which supplies from
the Deep South flowed north towards the front lines. "So much cavalry" was relatively
minor gaffe compared to the next one, which rendered the song unintentionally
comical. In The Band's version, Kane's wife calls out "Hey, Virgil, look, come
see -- here comes Robert E. Lee." Baez sings "here comes The Robert E. Lee,"
as though a Mississippi steamboat had somehow found its way overland into eastern
Tennessee. Good grief. Despite these flaws, however, Baez reached the number
3 spot on the singles charts with her version of the song in the autumn of 1971.
And now you know ... the rest of the story!
For the facts and photographs relating to the historical Casey Jones and the composition of "Casey Jones," Norm Cohen's Long Steel Rail: The Railroad In American Folksong (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).
For the facts and photographs relating to the race between The Robert E. Lee and The Natchez, Manley Wade Wellman's Fastest On the River (New York: Henry Holt, 1957).
For information about Al Jolson and the composers of "Waiting For The Robert E. Lee," Herbert G. Goldman's Jolson: The Legend Comes To Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
For information about Billy Murray and the American Quartet's original version of "Casey Jones," and also for information on the recording industry in the acoustical recording era, Frank Hoffman, Dick Carty, & Quentin Riggs' Billy Murray: The Phonograph Industry's First Great Recording Artist (Lanham MD: Scarecrow Press, 1997).
For information about Jesse James, Susan Swain's liner notes to Various Artists ... Piano Blues -- Vol. 2: The Thirties (1930-1939). (Story of Blues [Germany] CD 3512-2), and Greil Marcus's contribution to the booklet accompanying Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music Volume Four (Revenant RVN 211, 2000), p. 80.
For information about bestseller chart positions, Joel Whitburn's books were indispensible. They included Pop Memories 1890-1954 (Menomonee Falls WI: Record Research Inc., 1986), Top Pop Singles 1955-1990 (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1991), & Top Country Singles 1944-1988 (Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1989). Whitburn relies principally on the charts compiled by Billboard, supplemented by additional sources during the period coverd by Pop Memories.
"Casey Bill" by Earl McDonald's Original Louisville Jug Band: from Various Artists ... Ruckus Juice & Chitlins, Vol. 2 (Yazoo 2033).
"Casey Jones" by the American Quartet: from Billy Murray Vol. 2 (privately published CD made from old cylinders and discs; available from P&L Antiques http://www.pandlantiques.com/cdindy.html, in Folsom, CA.).
"Casey Jones" by Carl Sandburg: from Carl Sandburg ... Songs Of America (Lyrichord America LYRCD 6003).
"Casey Jones" by Eddy Arnold: from Eddy Arnold ... I'm Throwing Rice (At the Girl I Love) And Other Favorites By Eddy Arnold (RCA Camden CAS-897[e]), a vinyl LP.
"Casey Jones" by Johnny Cash: from Various Artists ... Mystery Train: Classic Railroad Songs, Volume 2 (Rounder CD 1129).
"Casey Jones" by The Grateful Dead: from The Grateful Dead ... Workingman's Dead (Warner Bros. W2 1869).
"Casey Jones (The Union Scab)" by Pete Seeger: from Pete Seeger ... If I Had a Hammer - Songs Of Hope And Struggle (Smithsonian Folkways SF CD 40096).
"Casey Jones Went Down On The Robert E. Lee," by Arthur Collins & Byron G. Harlan: from Collins And Harlan 1902-1917 (privately published CD made from old cylinders and discs; available from P&L Antiques http://www.pandlantiques.com/cdindy.html in Folsom, CA.).
"Freight Train Boogie" by The Delmore Brothers: from The Delmore Brothers ... Freight Train Boogie (Ace [UK] CDCH 455).
"Kassie Jones, Parts 1&2" by Furry Lewis: from Various Artists ... Anthology Of American Folk Music, Volume 1 (Smithsonian Folkways SFQ 40090 / A28747 -- disc 2 of a six disc box set).
"Knockin' Casey Jones" by Wilmer Watts & His Lonely Eagles: from Various Artists ... Times Ain't Like They Used To Be, Volume 2 (Yazoo 2029).
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by Joan Baez: from Joan Baez ... Hits/Greatest & Others (Vanguard VSD 79332).
"The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by The Band: from The Band ... The Band (Capitol CDP 7 46493 2).
"Southern Casey Jones" by Jesse James: from Various Artists ... Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, Volume Four (Revenant RVN 211).
"Steamboat Bill" by Arthur Collins: from Collins And Harlan 1902-1917 (privately published CD made from old cylinders and discs; available from P&L Antiques http://www.pandlantiques.com/cdindy.html in Folsom, CA.).
"Talking Casey" by Mississippi John Hurt: from Mississippi John Hurt ... Today! (Vanguard VMD 79220).
"Waiting For The Robert E. Lee" by Al Jolson & Bing Crosby: from Al Jolson with Bing Crosby ... Let Me Sing And I'm Happy (Parrot[UK] PARCD004).
"Waiting For The Robert E. Lee" by Louis Jordan: from Louis Jordan ... Let the Good Times Roll (Bear Family [Germany] BCD 15557 [disc 2]).