Train Songs

From "The Midnight Special" to the "Last Train to Clarksville," trains have crisscrossed blues and country, folk, rock, and jazz like a million miles of steel rail. Elvis Presley's backwoods vocal twang captures the bluesy heat of Junior Parker's "Mystery Train" while Scotty Moore lays down crackerjack rockabilly licks over the clickety-clack of Bill Black's locomotive percussion. Arlo Guthrie, with his voice perched atop a rambling rhythm track like a hobo riding an open boxcar, laments the railroad's disappearing culture in the Steve Goodman-penned "City of New Orleans." And Glenn Miller, fronting his swing-era big band, buffs out the 1941 hit "Chattanooga Choo Choo" to a brassy — no, make that platinum (since it sold more than a million copies) — finish.

In Next Steps we go uptown, out to the wide-open spaces, and even across the border into the Great White North.

In "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," Gordon Lightfoot combines a folky history lesson of Canada's coast-to-coast expansion with the lore of the navvies, compressing a journey of nearly 4,000 miles into just over seven minutes. Elizabeth Cotten was 64 years old before she recorded her first album, but her "Freight Train" struck a chord with folkies everywhere and turned up on thousands of set lists and over 100 recordings. And in their "Choo Choo Ch' Boogie," from 1946, jump-blues hepcats Louis Jordan & His Tympany Five crank out the snappy rhythm of a train-lovin' vagabond whose chief ambition is to "live the life of Riley in a beaten-down shack."

Whether it's with a pulsating Eurodance groove or the depiction of a homegrown hobo's paradise, our Train Songs Deep Cuts will keep you on track.

Kraftwerk's sleek bullet train of a track, "Trans Europe Express," rolls right out of the station and onto the dance floor in a wash of synthesizers and electronic percussion, punctuated by a slightly sinister melody, as though programmed by a lurking KGB operative. Haywire Mac, also known as Harry McClintock, not only performs "Big Rock Candy Mountain," but he's also alleged to have written it, although in a much rawer form. Since it's a longtime kids' fave, the "cigarette trees" of a hobo's paradise often morph magically into "peppermint trees" . . . and don't even ask about the original version's "streams of alcohol." And in their country rockin' "Glendale Train," the New Riders of the Purple Sage hippify the exploits of the James Gang's legendary robbery of the Chicago & Alton Railroad's boxcar full of booty.

The iron horse. The steel rail. From the Rock Island Line to the Marrakesh Express, trains have been rolling through popular music ever since the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad launched their first steam locomotive, "Tom Thumb," in 1829. Sometimes the sound of escape, sometimes a reminder of freedom lost, the train's high-lonesome whistle whines across blues, folk, and country, and the rumble of its wheels along the tracks have been found as far uptown as Harlem and as far out of town as the wide prairie. Our musical salute to the railroad may not always be bound for glory, but it does span three continents and seven decades . . . not to mention any kind of music you could possibly want to hear. All aboard!