Train Music!

[AnotherSpin]

8 hours ago, sphinxsix said:

And maybe even more importantly what about e.g. Chopin.?! 

 

 

 

There were many trains in Austria named after the composers. I travelled on several of them when Europe was still of some interest to me. Like Mozart, Bruckner, Lehar, etc.

[AnotherSpin]

1 hour ago, Iving said:

lol 

i learned a long time ago not to declare expiry of personal interest in threads on this forum!

yours was an exceptional run yesterday.

 

It was not a declaration but an explanation of the meaning of particular post which most likely was not understood properly. Anyway thank you for your attention I appreciate it 🙂

[AnotherSpin]

Turns out the train theme is still dragging its long tail! Okay, it's hard to understand the interest in finding obscure blues artists, especially since the train theme is present permanently in this genre, and hundreds if not thousands of examples can be found without much difficulty. Why not turn to truly great musicians, such as Grateful Dead. Mentioned Casey Jones already. What else we could find?

 

• I Know You Rider: ”I wish I was a headlight on a north bound train..."
• Beat It Down a Line: “I’ll be waiting at the station, Lord, when that train pulls on by"
• That's It for the Other One: “Perhaps I'll take the very next train."
• New Speedway Boogie: ”This train goes slow."
• Truckin’: “and the train goes slow."
• Tennessee Jed: ”Listen to the whistle of the evening train."
• Jack Straw: “First train we can ride."
• They Love Each Other: “And when the train rolls in”
• Might As Well: “Long train running from coast to coast”
• Terrapin: “but the train put its brakes on”
• Tons of Steel: “She’s more a roller coaster than a train I used to know”
• Lazy River: “Bright blue boxcars train by train”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[AnotherSpin]

18 minutes ago, Iving said:

 

For me, sharing/celebration of "great musicians" is just under half the fun with these Theme threads.

 

What's just over half is the discovery of something amazing I didn't already know. I'm still reeling with gratitude to Tom aka @DuckToller for Dead Moon's "Walking On My Grave" [cf. Moon Music thread]. I'm not sure Dead Moon are by all accounts "great musicians", but they sure got my mojo working 😉

Suum cuique 🙂

 

Of course, we can experience pleasure in many different ways. I thought it was interesting to find an answer where no one is looking for it, will not look for it, or could not find it. Or couldn't see it before ones very eyes... The ticket was for the train 🙂

 

 

[AnotherSpin]

23 minutes ago, christopher3393 said:

 

 

Here ya go:

 

http://deadessays.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-grateful-dead-and-trains-guest-post.html

 

( note that the Garcia Band recorded a number of railroad covers not listed above)

 

Did you happen to know that I know You Rider is derived from several traditional black folk blues songs and then transformed into a white

folk song in the sixties? Joan Baez covered it. The Dead made it rock.

 

And did you happen to know that the dead covered a couple of songs by Jesse Fuller, one of those obsure blues guys mentioned above?

 

 

 

And the Dead covered 3 songs by an obscure folk blues band called Cannon's Jug Stompers? One of them is a train song:

 

 

 

 So, for me, it's more complicated. I believe that Jerry, Phil, and Bob -- and certainly Pigpen! -- had a different attitude about blues roots music than you do. And I share that. The list that lving posted is, to me, a great list. I know that in my guts and in my bones. It's a felt sense from having listened to (and played for a few years) a lot of blues, live and recorded. I grew up outside of Chicago. So where you may hear an uninspired static redundancy, I hear and feel a lot of life, dynamism, and variety. So many different approaches to railroad blues! Sometimes subtle, but not boring for me, and not second rate. Some of this old stuff is some of the very best recorded. I;m thinking of Robert Johnson, for example.

 

Fine if you don't hear it that way. Just a different experience.

 

 

 

 

True, the Grateful Dead has many references to the subject of trains, I mentioned some obvious ones. 

 

Of course Dead played the blues, even though not as often as some other rock bands that became popular in the late 60's. Samson and Delilah, which was performed by Reverend Gary Davies immediately comes to memory, but there are much more examples. Still, Dead were not so much influenced by blues as by some other genres.

 

When I said about obscure blues artists, it was not to belittle the blues as a genre. I love and have listened to the blues for decades. It's just that the theme of trains is so popular in the blues that I don't even think it makes sense to start, there are thousands of examples. It's much harder and more interesting to find mention of trains in songs of other genres, where they are incomparably rare. But, I won't lose sleep if somebody thinks otherwise. 🙂

 

 

 

[AnotherSpin]

28 minutes ago, sphinxsix said:

 

1. I've already posted this very video and 5 other versions by SRT:

 

 

Ok, sorry

[AnotherSpin]

10 hours ago, Iving said:

Anyway ... if I were approaching Blues as a [Trains or Railroads] sub-topic again, I would distil as a specialist area the Gandy Dancers. Seems to me mention-worthy for both musical and historical reasons.

 

Fascinating article here commencing with reference to Jimmie Rogers: 

https://bluesrootsusa.com/2019/03/gandy-dancers

 

Blues is limited in its expressive means to two or three themes (as trains, for example), manic-depressive transitions between irrepressible longing and suspicious overexcitement, and a scarce musical arsenal. Fortunately, in other places one can find free, healthy and natural expression of the train theme: 

 

[AnotherSpin]

1 minute ago, Iving said:

I was just playing this on my phone. My wife started singing along to it. (She is a gifted soprano.) I said, oh do you know it. She said we used to do this in our ladies' choir. I said well is it about trains. She said that [i.e. referring to your post] sounded like a train, but when we did it it didn't - it just sounded like a ladies choir!

 

I looked it up - 2nd National Anthem of South Africa. Thanks

 

You welcome. Shosholoza is a traditional miner's song, originally sung by groups of men from the Ndebele ethnic group that travelled by steam train from their homes in Zimbabwe (formerly known as Rhodesia) to work in South Africa's diamond and gold mines - from Wikipedia.

[AnotherSpin]

More good music about trains to compensate some obscure crap:

 

 

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and more:

 

 

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Some old healthy rock:

 

https://youtu.be/rNJ8MOAj4rY

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2 minutes ago, Iving said:

dup

please remove

[AnotherSpin]

37 minutes ago, Iving said:

Trains?

Listen: "Sometimes I think sitting on trains..."
 

[AnotherSpin]

48 minutes ago, christopher3393 said:

😊

Some people called it devil music. Of course they called jazz devil music for some of the same and some different reasons. As to its limits?

Blues is capacious. Lots of room inside. Topically it covers travel by multiple means, painful aspects of relationships (unfaithfulness, unrequited love, loss, loneliness), sexual longings , prowess, and flirtation, natural disasters (flooding), meager rewards for work, poverty, social dislocation, hypocrisy (including preachers), escape into euphoria with drugs and drink and the resultant troubles that follow, social inequity, racial prejudice, defeating or even killing adversaries, reversals of fortune and frustrated expectations, the inescapable immanence of violence and death, ignominy, on and on and on...

 

 

 OK, so what is this? A jazz-rock showpiece with room to stretch out and show your chops, with a kind of white guy blues flavor, performed at a ski resort in Idaho for rich white folk. 😊

 

It starts off sounding like 2:19 Blues (Mamie's Blues), which goes like this:

 

Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton :: Mamie's Blues (Two Nineteen)

 

 

 

or like this (Louis Armstrong et. al.)

 

 

...or even like this:

 

Leon Redbone LIVE- 2:19 Blues (Mamie's Blues)

 

 

 

Even folkie Dave Von Ronk has a nice version. None of them sound like BS&T's cover to me.

 

Then David Clayton-Thomas seems to be quoting the blues standard "Trouble in MInd", which goes like this:

 

Trouble in Mind · Bertha "Chippie" Hill w/ songwriter Richard Johnson on piano and Louis Armstrong on trumpet.

 

 

Trouble in Mind - Dinah Washington

 

 

Trouble In Mind (Live In New York/1965) · Nina Simone 

 

 

and my personal favorite:

 

Lightnin Hopkins ~ Trouble in mind  

 

 

 

 

 

or even like this:

 

Trouble In Mind · Johnny Cash

 

 

or this!

 

 Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band cover of Richard M. Jones' "Trouble In Mind."

 

 

 

What they all have in common is that they respect the feel of the song, unlike BS&T.

 

Now the key lyric that makes this a train song is this and only this:

 

I'm gonna lay my head on some lonesome railroad line

and let that 2:19 special ease my troubled mind.

 

but Clayton Thomas doesn't include that. And then he goes on to throw some other random blues lyrics together, ending with a crude paraphrase of Mercy Dee Walton's "One Room Country Shack", a solid country blues song covered well by the likes of Buddy Guy ( a tradmark song for him), John Lee Hooker, and Paul Butterfield (a white guy from Chicago who understood the blues). They all kept it slow and mournful. They respected the song.

 

So in my opinion, BS&T's number is a showy, frivolous co-opting of blues, so that the players can strut their stuff. And it's not a train song except in a token way.

 

Sorry, Another Spin. I think we're a world apart on this. But, let the train song play on!

 

Everybody Loves a Train · Los Lobos  

 

 

 

 

 

Even more, blues has a huge advantage over other music styles that have been mentioned in your long message, such as jazz. The advantage is that after you have heard two or three blues songs, you don't have to try to hear any more, there will be the same repetitive thing - both in terms of music and lyrics 🙂 

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