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III. 4. RAILROADERS AND HOBOS
/ don't like no railroad man, Railroad man will kill you if he can, I don't like no railroad man.
I don't like no railroad fool. Railroad fool's got a head like a mule, I don't like no railroad fool. |
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THE WRECK ON THE SOMERSET ROAD
c. No. 1532. Justis Begley, Hazard, Ky., 1937. Compare with "The Wreck of the Old '97."
Soon one mornin', was mis tin' rain,
Round the curve come a passenger train.
Just as he struck Reno Hill,
Slowed his whistle an awful squill,
Womens and chilluns come screamin' an' cryin',
Big Joe Carmichael comin' down the line.
The two smart song writers who picked up "Casey Jones" from Mississippi Negroes and smoothed it up for vaudeville got all the credit and the money, too; but the folk song that made the headlines was "The Wreck on the Old '97." Vernon Dalhart put it on Victor records, and they sold a million copies in the late nineteen-twenties. By 1933 a suit against Victor was filed by one David G. George of Atlanta, Georgia, who insisted that he had composed the song in 1903 immediately after the wreck occurred. Robert Gordon gathered evidence to show that the song was made up not by David George, but by several men, yet the court upheld the plaintiff. The case is still being appealed.
It was never claimed, of course, that the tune was original, for "The Wreck of the Old '97" was sung to the doleful old air, "The Ship That Never Returned." That this tune had been similarly used before and for more or less the same purpose is indicated in the following ballad, possibly an older song and the foster parent of the "Old '97," which hints darkly of dark doings on the "old, old Somerset Road."
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