Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

Across the cotton fields beyond a hamlet named England a pool seventeen miles long and seven miles wide is being built. This is Lock and Dam No. 6 in the Arkansas River and Tributaries Project, a 1-2 billion dollar flood-control scheme which will also provide a navigable waterway from Oklahoma through to the Mississippi. On these baygalls South-East of Little Rock the pile-driving gangs in yellow casques and Mae Wests are building the spillway. Cranes grind through the slush holding steel stakes like straws in their serrated mandibles; tug crews manipulate the ninety-foot sheet steel walls of the cofferdam cells; draglines, earth-shifters and tractor-mounted backhoes scoop out the connecting channels.

  Jay Halverson, a crew-cut man of twenty-nine in knee-high lace-up boots, is chief engineer for Dravo, the Pittsburgh contractor, but only two of the men on the job come from Pittsburgh. They come from Tennessee, from West Virginia, from Oklahoma, from New York. Jay Halverson himself was born in South Dakota and graduated from Iowa State University.

  Leaning on a red heavy duty truck among the phalanx of trailer offices beside a notice THIS IS A HARD HAT JOB. POSITIVELY! he says: ‘This is my seventeenth move in ten years. I’ve worked mostly on river and levee projects, in Georgia, in Iowa, up in Oregon, three places in South Dakota, on the Big Bend Dam on the Missouri River.

  ‘I built a one million dollar parking lot at Mount Rushmore and before this I was excavating on a missile site in Nebraska. That’s how it is with most of the men in this field, the reinforced steel men and the structure steel men. They’re pretty much of a clan. They follow the jobs through the country.

  ‘I would hate to think of settling down. There are too many places to go. Too many new sights to see. There’s a sense of adventure about this. You never know where it’ll be next.

  ‘I’m married, with three young children, but my wife feels the same as I do. She’d never moved out of Council Bluffs until we got married. Then we just went zzzzsssst: started moving. It sure broadens your friendship out. Everywhere we go we find new friends, through the church organizations, the neighbors, the suppliers, the PTA.

  ‘Usually when I start a new job I go ahead and find a house to rent, which may take one day or four weeks, then Karen joins me with the kids. We’ve always rented in the past but this job will take until 1968 and we feel that times are good so we’ve bought a 19,500 dollar home in North Little Rock. We figure we should be able to sell for as much as we paid or even make a profit on it.

  ‘We buy our furniture from Sears Roebuck. It’s cheap and it looks nice enough but it’s nothing we need get attached to. It’s expendable. If a leg gets broken off or something gets scratched up it’s no great loss. We don’t find there’s anything to hold us to a house or a town. We’re always ready for the next change.’

  On a July day I drove out of Arkansas, West across the Ozark Mountains and along Route 33. This is a narrow, frayed ribbon of poorly-maintained tarmac which jitters on flatly through the Oklahoma savannah between pepperings of unpainted Negro and white ’cropper huts, and little seesawing oil pumps nodding to themselves like idiot heads in the roasting sun.

  I passed many churches, as ramshackle as the melon patch hovels, and advertisements of divine rescue were one of the many lures: Church of the God of Prophecy and Tastee-Freez Thick Shakes, Church of Christ Fully Air Conditioned and Ritz Hi-Hat Restaurant, Sacred Church of Nazarene and Madame Ree Palm Reader, First Free Will Baptist Church and a travelling roller skating tent rink, Immanuel Baptist Church and the Cove Motel for Colored, Twin Assembly of God Church and Clabber Girl Baking Powder, Missionary Baptist Church and Wesleyan-Metho-dist Church and Episcopal Church and Free Christian Church, and Love That Delegate and Mister Donut and Micro-Midget Go Kart Racing and Dixie Comfort Peach Wine; on the car radio, a girl harmony trio with a jingle weather forecast ‘What is the weather like today? Are the neighborhood skies blue or grey?’ and a Back to God program sponsored by the ‘new great way to carry home cans of beer. Each top twists off real easy’ and the invitation to visit ‘The Book of Job, a Unique Outdoor Drama’ and the drone of hog and heifer prices.

  The sun dipped. The buzzards wheeled down to their woods. I ran through short bursts of neon morse code on the wayside chicken jukes and sugar shacks and at eleven-thirty entered the main street of a place named Stillwater, past the closed hardware stores, the closed business blocks, the closed five-and-ten, the closed churches. The Rio Restaurant was open, dilating with tingling lights.

  I sat in one of the yellow and Cambridge blue plastic booths. The room busily sizzled with cooking hamburgers and clanged with the cash register keys. A state Trooper in fawn shirt and pants, with a pearl-handled revolver hanging from his bullet belt, was playing the Thoro-Bred pintable. Every counter stool was overhung like an icecream cone by a pair of enormous buttocks bulging inside Levis or putty ducks.

  They were all fearsomely large men, some with black sideboards, some with hair skived down to an angry stubble, some wearing felt and straw hats or green forage caps tipped back, most in bronco boots. They could easily have walked in from their new land claims, on Oklahoma Territory, just thrown open to its 1889 white settlement: nesters and grangers arrived in Murphy freight wagons and the big Osnaburg-topped wagons, cattle drovers passing through, or hide hunters and gold washers from beyond the new spreads.

  While I ate my hickory smoked ham and hush puppies, a sort of corn meal rissole, I studied the remote-control nickelodeon panel in my booth. The musical menu displayed total indifference to the Top Ten fever charts of current metropolitan hits. Even if the churches were shuttered for the night, there was what sounded like a rousing come-forward-holy hymn throbbing through the amplifier, except that the words were about the mortification of secular love: Please don’t wait for me, darling - I’ll always be an ex-convict and branded wherever I go.

  It was replaced by a three-year-old recording, Gale Garnett’s We’ll Sing in the Sunshine - she’ll lend him her love for a year, then she’ll have to move on, a tender fatalism.

  It was all country music and almost all of it to do with getting out of town or being given the go-by by a girl who had got out of town. There were familiar names there, Roy Orbison and Chet Atkins and the Everley Brothers and Floyd Cramer, but the music was as out-of-time as the oil drillers and grain milling hands around me. The titles were Midnight Special and Memphis and Willie was a Gamblin’ Man and Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun and A Sharecropper’s Life and Out of a Honky Tonk.

  I put in a dime and pressed the button for a song entitled The Hobo and the Rose by Webb Pierce, hitherto unknown to me. It turned out to be a plangent requiem about a young man who could not win the hand of a particular home town girl; so pinning on the white rose she gave him he snagged a freight out. Years later the girl pushes through a crowd beside the tracks at the whistle stop and she instantly recognizes the cadaver being unloaded by the rose (presumably mummified) pinned to his ragged jacket. He is buried in a poor man’s grave, still wearing the rose.

  One of the customers at the counter, in high filigreed boots and a scarlet shirt with a brass ring and jewel at the neck, slumped listening intently to the words. He appeared much affected by them; his face was broody.

  Perhaps he had a rose among his belongings? Perhaps at least he had a home town and a home town girl somewhere down the track where earlier I had driven beside a black locomotive throwing its grunting cry, crestfallen, into the twilight as it pulled a line of rumbling trucks marked soo Line, Eerie Lackawanna, Route of the Eagles, The Route Of Phoebe Snow and Texas-Pacific Line.

  Since the first Irish navvies - canallers they had been called when they were digging the canals - sang about building the railroads in Pat Works on the Railway and Drill Ye Tarriers, Drill, the train as a symbol of opportunity and removal, rough going though it might be, has been the dominant image in American music.

  Even now that the suburbs spill out and tangle into linear ‘Big Streets’, the megalopolis of the future, and that nowhere is more than an hour or two away by air, the
train and its signatures of great distances keep their potency of enticement.

  From the beginning the train’s whistle wailed like a summons, or a taunt, fanning through a thousand remote, meagre farming regions: Down in the valley … hear that train blow and Lord, I hate to hear that lonesome whistle blow. The Southern Negro, believing that there was freedom up in the fabled North, saw the train’s smokestack shine like gold: that was its value to him. But in another blues: Every time a freight train makes up in the yard, Some po’ woman got an aching heart, because taking off in it would be a man she was unlikely ever to see again.

  *

  It is difficult to over-emphasize the significance with which the train is charged in the lives of the American poor and the American nomadic worker. Its insistent hammer of steel wheels is the bass note in the fugue of the American struggle; it is the vehicle of sadness and separation in uncountable blues and folk ballads; it has shaped and coloured the music itself, the train rhythm of wandering saw mill and turpentine camp pianists, the desolate rasp of a hillbilly harmonica blowing like a whistle; and it has given the metrical pattern to a vast body of country-and-Western music whose composers and singers have been brake-men or hobos or who played as children around a railhead cattle yard.

  Barrelhouse bars and honky tonks have always pressed up close to a division point or water tank stop where construction workers, argonauts in overalls, swing off the freights to spend their money on liquor and company, and where the improvised music soaks up the bitter-sweet sense of immense emptiness ahead and behind. The train, spelling distance and departure, became a keynote of the poetry and dialect imagery of blue-collar America.1

  Lomax credits the railroad with being the source and inspiration of the greatest body of good American music: the best ballads, John Henry and Casey Jones; powerful, work-chants for every aspect of railroad building; spirituals like This Train and All Night Long; love songs like Down in the Valley and Careless Love; blues verses by the stack - ‘indeed the blues might be said to be half-African and half-locomotive rhythm … What a ship on the sea is to an Englishman, a droshky on the snow to a Russian, a horse on the desert to an Arab, the iron horse became to the men of North America.’ She’ll be Coming ‘Round the Mountain, an early anonymous Western railroad ditty, displaced the original hymn tune, The Old Ship of Zion, because it caught ‘the jubilation of that halcyon day when the first steam engine came whistling and snorting into a horse-and-buggy town on the prairies’.

  And the train whistled and snorted on into jazz and pop music. The dramatis personae of the chart-toppers in any regional café juke box -consistently lachrymose or hearts-and-flowers Victorian in mode, and given an extra keening quality by the hard, twangy, mountain nasalness - are railroad boomers and truck drivers, moonshiners and rambling men, and perennially the theme, treated with either repining sadness or love-’em-and-leave-’em comedy, is that of restlessness and the out yonder.

  It is a crude lyricism about the man who is moving out of town, sometimes because ‘winter’s coming on’ and work has to be chased elsewhere, oftener an expression of an accepted norm of edginess, the need to ensure that not a spore of moss gathers on the rolling stone; it is about a boy drawn away by the city lights and who on his way back home (wings burned or possibly burnished) stops short of his love Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa, that romance broken in a highway roadhouse which could have been set nowhere but in the United States. Britain ? Twenty-four hours from Truro or Tunbridge Wells, you’d be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean or among other tongues. Even in a larger country the atmosphere would not fit the sentiment. America has it in the bloodstream.

  The motif of footlooseness and estrangement is at the core of all American popular music, and nowhere more hauntingly than in the doggerel of the itinerant Negro bluesman who travelled most arduously yet who still kept the jab in the nerve about places five or ten states away, and who sang of Chicago or Shreveport or Texakarna. Down there in his second-class citizenship the Negro has shared in the troublesome and stirring element in the Zeitgeist of American life: that continuing wonderment, the almost baffled sense of the unreachable which the American feels about his enormous nation. The sky’s the limit, has always been the going rule - but how is the way there to be found?

  The ‘foreignness’ which the American receives from his own land has impregnated American song, for the most part quite artificially, a Tin Pan Alley aerosol squirt of nostalgia. Nevertheless, however sham is the yearning of a Manhattan lyric writer for his cabin in Alabam’, what starts out as a concoction on a Union Square electric typewriter frequently takes on a true denotation.

  What the lyric writer is accurately responding to is the tug between roots and rootlessness in the American inheritance. To drive through America is to have the sense of rifling through an index of sheet music: Noel Coward’s quip (’Nasty insistent little tune. Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.’) is naggingly borne out. As you flash past a town’s welcome plaque or register half unconsciously a highway’s turn-off list, uncountable scraps of by-gone and believed forgotten tunes flit into the mind. You remember the girl from Kalamazoo and that stars fell on Alabama; you mentally do the Charleston and the Jersey bounce. You remember that you are nine little miles from Ten-Ten-Tennessee and you’re coming Virginia; you’re shuffling off to Buffalo and deep in the heart of Texas. You have the Beale Street blues and Georgia’s on your mind or you’re being carried back to Peoria. You see a Chattanooga choo-choo and you realize that you’re on the Alamo. Moonlight in Vermont may shine upon you and you find that you are instinctively on the look out for the big noise from Winnetka.

  Although there remains a rich trove of ‘funny’ small town names for lyricists to plug, as the eye sweeps the map it seems that there are few areas which have not had at least a brief and passing enscrollment in tonic sol-fa, and I doubt if there is any state in the Union which has not been so enshrined - there are even Arkansas Blues and Montana Call and Florida Blues. I do not actually know of a song dealing with Oregon or Rhode Island or New Hampshire but I would be surprised if someone at some time in the past hundred years had not worked them in. Certainly songs celebrating specific music-orientated cities or districts are too multitudinous to count. New Orleans could support a song biography to itself, and I have quickly jotted down twenty-odd jazz and pop tunes (mostly from the thirties when it was voguey with whites) about Harlem, from Ellington’s Drop Me Off at Harlem to the improbable Harlem Chapel Chimes.

  It does not lessen. One of Peggy Lee’s best albums of recent years was Blues Cross Country with the Quincy Jones band. It included such standards as Basin Street Blues and St Louis Blues but there was a lot of original material mostly composed by Miss Lee herself, including The Grain Belt Blues (way out on the plains where the air is sweet, in between the aircraft insecticide sweeps presumably) and blues about San Francisco and Los Angeles. There also - written, may it be noted, by a sophisticated cabaret singer of the 1960s who is doubtless whisked to her engagement by jet plane - is The Train Blues:

  Love to see those big wheels roll

  Roll over the country - it’s so good for my soul.

  One of America’s first million sale gramophone records - the ninth, after Caruso, in the industry’s history - was a train drama: Vernon Dalhart’s 1924 Victor version of The Wreck of the Old ’98, a barnstorming narrative, done very hillbilly and with lavish rumbling-and-wailing sound effects, of an actual disaster when in 1903 the Southern’s No. 97 fast mail between Washington and Atlanta swerved off a mountain bridge near Danville, Virginia, killing the crew. The freight-riding rambling man especially really does ‘love to see those big wheels roll’, and loves the lore which has been spun by them, and he sings about it in the boxcars.

  That has been the manner in which the American has addressed the train ever since, in Lomax’s vivid metaphor: ‘From the Cat-skills to the Cascades the continent was strung with steel like a great harp.’ For the railroad barons the harp’s diapaso
n was of money and power but it made a different music for the poor: The mule-skinner in the Mississippi bottoms timed his long days by the whistle of the passing trains. The mountaineer, penned up by his Southern hills, heard the trains blowing down in the valley and dreamed of the big world “out yonder”. The blue-noted whistles made a man miss a pretty woman he’d never seen. Boys ir hick towns, lost on the prairie, heard the locomotives snorting and screaming in the night and knew they were bound to small town stagnation only for the lack of a railroad ticket.

  ‘Americans had always had an itching heel. When the railroads came along, they began to travel so far and so often that, in the words of the old blues, “their feet got to rolling like a wheel, yeah, like a wheel”.’

  The train whistle is still a siren call and a dart to the heart of the wanderer: the invitation away or the reminder that a thousand miles down the cinders is the town for which he may have no particular love but which is extricably bound up in his boyhood or in some years of marriage. The sound of the train and its pervasive symbolism are contained with the strongest and most obsessionally imaginative use in the blues.

  23 The freezin’ ground was my foldin’ bed last night

  Wonderin’ can I get a foot-race and a restin’ place,

  I likes a good race and a good restin’ place,

  I likes a close shave and a powdered face,

  Close shave and a shallow grave.

  Jealous James Stanchell: Anything From A Foot-Race to A Resting Place

  The blues - an extremely stylized dilution from earlier ‘ditties’, field hollers, back-country ‘ballits’, mandolin rags, revivalist shape-note hymns and spirituals - formed and developed its subtle variations between 1885 and 1930, a period of massive upheaval in the South.

  Slavery was over but so also was the power and pre-eminence of cotton. A society which had been as proud as it had been rigid crumbled into landslide and Negro labourers, free now in the most ominous sense, were adrift in legions.