![]() ![]() Perhaps it is this ambivalent relationship to the railroad and the peculiarly Southern penchant for storytelling that gave Southerners so many train topics and legends to sing about? Railroads also aided the spread of disease, attracted violent robbers like Jesse James, and consolidated into monopolistic behemoths. White and black Southerners were entranced by the railroad and yearned for new connections, but Southern railroads were dangerous and deadly for passengers and workers. Southern train songs directly reflect the South’s distinctively magical and destructive history with the railroads - the very subject I was researching and writing. While this at first seemed to be a slightly obsessive diversion from the book, explaining the South’s predilection for train songs eventually became critical to the project. ![]() I stumbled into this connection between train songs and the South while building a playlist of train songs to accompany my research and writing for a history of Southern railroading. The railroad has long been a powerful cultural symbol for Americans.Īnd most of these train songs are sung with Southern accents. During his explorations in the rural South in the 1910s and 20s, folklorist Howard Odum marveled at how African American musicians performed train songs that simulated the noises of speeding locomotives. While some songs use trains as passing metaphors, others feature railroads as key plot devices (e.g., the train that takes your lover away), and some go so far as to emulate the distinctive rhythms and sounds of the rail. From the earliest days of railroading, American music has been unable to resist the lure of the locomotive. ![]()
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