A pianist accompanied a solo singer on a bare stage.
The singer was Mandy Patinkin and the pianist his longtime musical partner Adam Ben-David. Their version of “Rock Island,” the opening number from “The Music Man,” showed you don’t need costumes, sets and a big ensemble to engage an audience.
Or maybe their concert performance at Denver’s Newman Center just showed the power of a song about a train. I’ve come to think of train songs as a genre in which you can read American and global histories. The songs’ harmonies and rhythms, colored by our own memories and hopes, can take us on journeys of discovery.
I love the movie version of what I think is the best song in “The Music Man.” Robert Preston as Harold Hill in a snazzy check suit and straw hat, America’s fruited plains visible out the train windows. The lyrics address changes to society brought by faster communication and travel, even as they punctuate the machine-like rhythm and evoke the hiss of the steam engines bringing modernity to small-town America at the turn of the century.
The title “Rock Island” is the name of an Illinois railroad founded in 1847 that operated until 1980. The movie sequence shows the train leaving Brighton, Illinois to cross into Iowa. For years I thought the song was called 'He doesn't know the territory,’ its aggrieved refrain.
There was grievance, but also grudging admiration for Hill, whose scheming must have seemed downright quaint when the show premiered on Broadway a decade after World War II. Americans are impressed by entrepreneurial success, sometimes even when the entrepreneur is a conman.
LEADBELLY
Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, made an international hit out of an African American work song with a rhythm and name similar to “Rock Island.”
Leadbelly was an aide to ethnomusicologist John Lomax when the two first heard “Rock Island Line” in the 1930s sung by African American convicts. Its rhythms helped the prisoners get through the day on an Arkansas chain gang, and perhaps fueled dreams of freedom. Leadbelly’s recordings of it and other songs are credited with popularizing the blues around the world and inspiring rock music.
If you want to ride it, you have to ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line
Jesus died to save our sins, hooray to God
We're going to meet him again!
In the aftermath of slavery, trains carried African American fleeing north and west to escape the horrors of Jim Crow in the South. The Rock Island's routes included one from New Orleans through Memphis and on to Chicago, part of a network that also went to Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Pullman porters and dining car waiters on the Rock Island and other lines built middle class lives on railroad salaries and tips. They organized the first African American union to be granted American Federation of Labor membership. The porters’ union and its leader A. Philip Randolph played crucial roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Black railroad workers were respected in their communities, where they brought home news from across the country. Black parents entrusted their children to porters’ care when they had to travel alone.
During slavery, African Americans used not just the underground but the actual railroad to reach freedom. In 1849, for example, Henry Brown famously had himself nailed into a wooden crate -- three feet long, two and one-half feet deep, and two feet wide -- that was sent from Virginia on the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac Railroad to its terminus, and from there by steamboat up the Potomac River to Philadelphia. Brown had his crate labelled “dry goods,” which made me think of the rhythmic litany of merchandise that kick off the “Rock Island” songs of both Music Man and Leadbelly.
Curtis Mayfield tapped into the history of trains carrying Americans to a better future in a song that became a civil rights anthem: "People Get Ready."
So people get ready
There's a train a-comin'
You don't need no baggage
You just get on board
All you need is faith
To hear the diesels humming
Don't need no ticket
You just thank the Lord
MASEKELA
Mayfield's song was aspirational. People who felt they had no choice but to leave the South found racism in the North and West as well. Migrants around the world recognize that journeys’ ends can be bittersweet.
South African jazz trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela opened his 1974 hit “Stimela” with a spoken introduction reminiscent of Leadbelly setting the scene for “Rock Island Line.” As Masekela explains that Stimela -- the nickname for a coal-fired steam train -- is an homage to the migrant workers from across southern Africa who traveled to jobs in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s.
They think about their lands, and their herds
That were taken away from them
With the gun, and the bomb, and the teargas, the Gatling and the cannon
And when they hear that choo-choo train
A-chugging, and a pumping, and a smoking, and a pushing
A pumping, a crying and a steaming and a chugging and
A whoo whoo!
They always cuss, and they curse the coal train
The coal train that brought them to Johannesburg.
Then Masekela lets loose a cry that evokes a train whistle. I hear the anguish today when I read about impoverished South Africans attacking immigrants from neighboring countries they see as competitors for jobs and housing, rather than fellow inheritors of an economy built on inequity and racism.
It’s a familiar theme. A few years ago here in Denver, I saw local playwright Antonio Mercado's "Dreaming sin Fronteras," about the trials of young people brought to the U.S. before they are old enough to know what it means to be illegal.
Drummer, trumpeter and composer Shawn King of the Denver-based group DeVotchKa and lyricist and singer Raul Pacheco of the Los Angeles band Ozomatli wrote music for Mercado’s play.
On one of their songs, "La Bestia," or "The Beast," percussionists beat out a rhythm under lyrics recounting a perilous journey riding atop a train from Central America into northern Mexico on the way to the United States. Those who fall from the train to their deaths are described as being eaten by "the beast."
A train song doesn’t have to rely on grief for its power. As Paul Simon sings, “everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance.” The truths we hear in the sound can be about history and politics, but also nostalgia and love. Michelle Shocked has favorites for me in both the latter two categories "The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore" and "If Love Was a Train."
Smoky-voiced Cassandra Wilson brings wistfulness and anticipation to "Last Train to Clarksville" by songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart.
I'll be waiting at the station
We'll have time for coffee-colored kisses
And a bit of conversation
Sometimes, as “Music Man” composer Meredith Willson knew, train songs are just fun to sing. Or to hear, if the singer is as sublime as Patinkin.
Cash for the merchandise, cash for the button hooks
Cash for the cotton goods, cash for the hard goods
Cash for the fancy goods, cash for the soft goods
Cash for the noggins and the piggins and the firkins
Cash for the hogshead cask and demijohn
Cash for the crackers and the pickles and the flypaper
Look whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk, whatayatalk?
Whеredayagitit?
