Jimmie Rodgers – A Train Song

“Last night as I lay on the boxcar
Just waiting for a train to pass by
What will become of the hobo
Whenever his time comes to die” – Hobo’s Meditation (Jimmie Rodgers) © Peermusic Publishing

Hobo (noun) \ ˈhō-bō \

1: a migratory worker

2: a homeless and usually penniless vagabond

According to Merriam-Webster, the first known use of the word hobo was in 1888; they also report that the origin of the word is unknown. Other sources suggest that hobo may have derived from the English word hawbuck, which means “country bumpkin”, or from the common working man’s greeting during the time of the building of the railroads, “Ho, beau!” Others theorize that it stems from hoe-boy, meaning “farmhand”, or is an abbreviation of “homeward bound.” It could also be an abbreviation of “homeless boy.”

Merriam-Webster lists synonyms for hobo as bindlestiff, bum, tramp, vagabond, vagrant. Another source describes a hobo as a migrant worker or homeless vagrant, especially one who is impoverished, but makes the distinction that a “tramp” works only when forced to, and a “bum” does not work at all.

Merriam-Webster also lists hobo as an intransitive verb, meaning: to live or travel in the manner of a hobo.

Sources may differ on the definition of what a hobo is, or from where the designation originated, but there is no doubt that popular culture over the past century has left us with vivid images of hoboes.

Even those who do not recognize the name of Emmett Kelly would likely be familiar with the visage of his clown character “Weary Willie”, which he based on images of Depression-era hoboes. Charlie Chaplin created his own iconic character, mostly by accident, which became known as “The Tramp”. And who hasn’t dressed for Halloween in over-sized and worn-out clothes, carrying a bindle stick over their shoulder? But are these accurate portrayals of real hoboes or simply caricatures from a bygone era?

“There’s a Master up yonder in heaven
Got a place that we might call our home
Will we have to work for a living
Or can we continue to roam” – Hobo’s Meditation (Rodgers)

No one can be exactly certain when hobos began riding the rails. At the end of the American Civil War many soldiers discharged from duty began “hopping” freight trains to return to their homes and families. Men who were looking for work or just a new adventure began catching trains westward toward the American frontier.

In 1906, after an exhaustive study, Professor Layal Shafee put the number of tramps in the US at about a half-million (about 0.6% of the US population at the time). His article “What Tramps Cost Nation” was published by The New York Telegraph in 1911, when he estimated the number had surged to 700,000.

In the Great Depression era of the 1930s the number of hoboes grew sharply. Having no work at home, men took to riding the rails for free, hoping to find better opportunities elsewhere.

The Autobiography of a Super-tramp book cover

Life on the rails was dangerous. British poet W.H. Davies, author of The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp, lost a foot when he fell under the wheels trying to jump aboard a train. It was easy to be trapped between cars, and one could freeze to death in bad weather. Besides the physical danger of climbing on and off moving freight trains, hoboes often found themselves stranded in desolate places, with no food or water, rarely knowing whom they could trust, and always having to be on the lookout for railroad security staff, nicknamed “bulls”, for their frequently violent treatment of freeloaders.

“Will the hobo chum with the rich man
Will we always have money to spare
Will they have respect for the hobo
In that land that lies hidden up there” – Hobo’s Meditation (Rodgers)

Jimmie Rodgers, having grown up around railroading, and later working on the railroads himself, encountered many a hobo in his short lifetime, and even spent a little time riding the rails himself. He celebrated these men and their vagabond lifestyle in the lyrics of a number of his songs.

Same Train, A Different Time, by Merle Haggard - album cover

In 1968 Merle Haggard set about recording a tribute album to Jimmie Rodgers, who was one of his favorite artists. Released in the spring of the following year, Same Train, A Different Time (Merle Haggard Sings the Great Songs of Jimmie Rodgers) topped the country music charts without the benefit of a hit single. In between several of the album’s tracks Haggard included spoken word introductions, providing details of Rodgers’ life and the context of some of his compositions. Not surprisingly, much of Haggard’s narration speaks to Rodgers’ relationship with the hobo.

From “Narration #1”:

“Most of Jimmy’s in-person performances were in the area from Texas, east; and it was in this area that he knew the railroads and the railroaders, and the bums who rode the rods.

“Jimmy had a special feeling for the hobo and he was always good for a touch by one of the ‘knights of the road.’ He knew their problems and he knew them well, because Jimmy Rodgers had hoboed many of the mainlines himself.” Same Train, A Different Time (Merle Haggard Sings the Great Songs of Jimmie Rodgers)

From “Narration #4”:

“The hobo is a recurring subject in Jimmy Rodgers’ songs. Hoboing was an accepted form of travel for the migrant worker, or for the unemployed who simply wanted a change of weather. During the period of Jimmy’s greatest popularity, you could set your watch by the highball of any train.

“Hoboing was an inexpensive, almost sure way of getting from one place to another, and during the Depression it was not unusual to see, oh, maybe half a hundred ‘boes jump from a train just as it came into the outskirts of a city. They’d jump off as soon as they could so as to ditch the train “bulls” of the coming yard.

“But many quite respectable men found it convenient to hop trains also and many of ‘em died; identified only as a railroad bum . . .” – Same Train, A Different Time (Merle Haggard Sings the Great Songs of Jimmie Rodgers)

Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, Emmylou Harris - Trio album cover

While many songwriters have paid tribute to the hobo and the hobo lifestyle, probably none have done so more thoroughly than Jimmie Rodgers. One of my favorite Rodgers tunes is “Hobo’s Meditation”, which Merle Haggard covered well on his Same Train album. But another endearing version of that song can be found on the 1987 Warner Bros. Records release, Trio, featuring Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris.

“Will there be any freight trains in heaven
Any boxcars in which we might hide
Will there be any tough cops or brakemen
Will they tell us that we cannot ride” – Hobo’s Meditation (Rodgers)

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hobo#h1

All photos sourced through internet searches, none belong to the author.

“All around the water tank
Waiting for a train
A thousand miles away from home
Sleeping in the rain” – Waiting for a Train (Jimmie Rodgers) © Peermusic Publishing

Born on September 8, 1897, in Meridian, Mississippi, James Charles Rodgers has become known as “The Father of Country Music”. While he certainly didn’t invent the musical form, Rodgers, along with his contemporaries The Carter Family popularized the genre during the early days of radio and phonograph recordings. Though he also dabbled in folk, blues and jazz, it is for his accomplishments in bringing the traditional, nostalgic music of rural white people in the American South to the attention of a nation that would prove to have a huge appetite for this common strain of musical communication.

Rodgers’ mother died when he was six or seven, and he subsequently spent much of his youth living with various extended family in rural Mississippi & Alabama. Destined to be an entertainer, he had by the age of thirteen already spent time on the road organizing and performing in traveling shows, only to be tracked down and brought home by his father, Aaron Rodgers, a maintenance-of-way foreman on the Mobile and Ohio Railroad.

His father found young Jimmie his first job working on the railroad as a water boy. It was during this period that he was taught guitar technique by other rail workers and hoboes that he encountered on the job. As a water boy he would also have been exposed to the work chants of black gandy dancers. A few years later, through his older brother, Walter, he became a brakeman on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad.

“I walked up to a brakeman gave him a line of talk
He said if you’ve got money boy I’ll see that you don’t walk
I haven’t got a nickel, not a penny can I show
Get off, get off you railroad bum and he slammed the boxcar door” – Waiting for a Train (Rodgers)

In 1924, at age 27, Rodgers was diagnosed with tuberculosis. After a period the disease would cause him to give up working for the railroad, and he eventually returned to entertaining.

By 1927 Rodgers had returned to Meridian, MS, where he settled in with his wife Carrie and daughter Anita. April of that year found him in Asheville, North Carolina, where he performed on that city’s first radio station, WWNC, which would eventually lead to a weekly radio show for him and a band that he had cobbled together. In July of ’27 Rodgers would make his first recordings for Ralph Peer, a representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company, in Camden, New Jersey. Though success from those initial recordings was modest, he would return to New Jersey in November, armed with original songs co-written with his sister-in-law, Elsie Williams, who would eventually become his most frequent collaborator, writing or co-writing 40 songs for Rodgers.

One of the sides cut during this second series of sessions was “Blue Yodel”, also known as “T for Texas”. Over the next two years it would sell nearly half a million copies, cementing his place as one of the top recording stars of that era.

The next few years found Rodgers continuing to cut new records. He made a movie short for Columbia Pictures, The Singing Brakeman, toured the Midwest with Will Rogers, even made a recording of “Blue Yodel No. 9”, accompanied by Louis Armstrong on trumpet, and his wife, Lil Harden Armstrong on piano.

“He put me off in Texas a state I dearly love
The wide-open spaces all around me the moon and stars up above
Nobody seems to want me or to lend me a helping hand
I’m on my way from Frisco going back to Dixie Land” – Waiting for a Train (Rodgers)

Rodgers died May 26, 1933, at the age of 35, from a pulmonary hemorrhage. At the time of his death his recordings accounted for fully 10% of RCA Victor’s sales, in a market that had been severely impacted by the Great Depression. When the Country Music Hall of Fame was established in 1961, Rodgers was one of the first three inductees, along with music publisher/songwriter Fred Rose and singer/songwriter Hank Williams. Rodgers was inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 as an early influence, and inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013. Merle Haggard recorded a tribute album, Same Train, A Different Time: Merle Haggard Sings The Great Songs of Jimmie Rodgers, while Lynyrd Skynyrd named both Haggard and Rodgers in their song “Railroad Song” (“I’m going to ride this train, Lord, until I find out, what Jimmie Rodgers and the Hag was all about”).

On Haggard’s album, Same Train, A Different Time, in a spoken introduction, the singer refers to Rodgers as “the most important man, who ever sang a country song”.

On May 24, 1978, the United States Postal Service issued a 13-cent commemorative stamp honoring Rodgers, the first in its long-running Performing Arts Series. The stamp depicted him in brakeman’s outfit and guitar, giving his “two thumbs up” (as in one of the famous photos of him), along with a locomotive in silhouette in the background.

Chester Arthur Burnett, better known as Howlin’ Wolf, tried to emulate Rodgers’s yodel, but found that his efforts sounded more like a growl or a howl. “I couldn’t do no yodelin’,” Barry Gifford quoted him as saying in Rolling Stone, “so I turned to howlin’. And it’s done me just fine.”

Bob Dylan wrote in the liner notes to a 1997 tribute album: “Jimmie Rodgers, of course, is one of the guiding lights of the twentieth century, whose way with song has always been an inspiration to those of us who have followed the path. … He was a performer of force without precedent with a sound as lonesome and mystical as it was dynamic. He gives hope to the vanquished and humility to the mighty.”

The professional recording & performing career for which Jimmie Rodgers is remembered and revered lasted barely six years, and yet his influence is still felt nearly a century later by those who remain inspired by his musical legacy, and feel driven to pay tribute to the “Singing Brakeman” in their own personal way.

“Though my pocketbook is empty
And my heart is full of pain
I’m a thousand miles away from home
Just a-waiting for a train” – Waiting for a Train (Jimmie Rodgers) © Peermusic Publishing

Sources:

http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/39/jimmie-rodgers-the-father-of-country-music

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=Jimmie+Rodgers+%28country+singer%29+%E2%80%93+Wikipedia

All photos sourced through internet searches, unless otherwise noted

Tag: Jimmie Rodgers

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