Yet the rhythm and roll of the trains he worked on stamped themselves upon his plunketty guitar style and upon his subject matter. There is the same feeling, lighter textured, here as in the Negro blues, about life in the landscape of cotton gins, about Hobo Bill’s last ride, about building ‘me a shanty and settle down, gonna quit this run’ aroun’ ’, about Ben Dewberry, ‘a brave engineer on the old North Eastern and A & B’ who died fearless with the throttle wide open, about
some likes Chicago, some love Memphis, Tennessee
It’s sweet down in Texas where the women think the world of me.
Jimmy Rodgers’s work was a polite devitalization - nothing more disturbing than wistful sentimentality - of the harsh, despairing blues he must have heard on his trips through the black South, and most of it sounds wishy-washy and pasty. Yet in itself the ‘white blues’ he wrote (many of them old-timey tear-jerkers with titles like Old Pal of my Heart and Daddy and Home) were authentically homespun out of regional life on the hillbilly side of the colour line and carried the conviction that he had been where he said he’d been and done the things he sang about.
At his best Rodgers put into his stanzas the brininess of that infatuation with the railroad: pensive but with that old crab-apple flavour:
Every time I see that lonesome railroad train
Makes me wish that I was back home again,
and:
Now I can see a train coming down the railroad track
And I love to hear the bark of that old smoke stack.
The loss of his mother, and his father’s enforced absences down the line, perhaps later coloured Rodgers’s languishing yodel. Left on his own, the locomotive sheds became his centre - ‘the great, rushing, clanging, hissing machine … the symbol of his life,’ writes Silverman. ‘He would spend hours in the yards, absorbing the lingo, the yarns, and the songs of the railroaders, those wonderful wandering men who had been everywhere, seen and done everything.’
From the Negroes in the yards he learned the rudiments of guitar and banjo and also their pentatonic blue notes. He became a railroad man on the New Orleans and North Eastern and for fourteen years was ‘the Singing Brakeman.’ He was never robust. Tuberculosis developed. He left the railroad and became a street corner singer with a collecting cup, then joined a touring medicine show. He tried railroading again but it defeated him physically and he returned to a thin living from his guitar, until in 1927 he cut some audition records in Tennessee.
‘America’s Blue Yodeller’ became the rage, the Presley of his day. His first record royalty was twenty-seven dollars; when he died, he was making 100,000 dollars a year. His body was, appropriately, freighted back by funeral train from New York to the Southland.
It is, though, questionable if the Jimmy Rodgers story is quite the ‘epic’ it has since been proclaimed. What it does illustrate yet again is America’s narcissistic devotion to its own concurrent romance.
In 1953, twenty years after his death, his home town established itself as a shrine by staging a Jimmy Rodgers Memorial Day, at which were present Carrie Rodgers, Congressmen, governors of surrounding states, the widow of the famous Casey Jones, and a host of hillbilly singers and disc jockeys from neighbouring radio stations. The ceremonial focal point was in the park, a locomotive and a marble monument bearing an inscription of a fulsomeness which, while not being entirely persuasive that immortality is here, is informative of the American need for legend:
His is the music of America.
He sang the songs of the people he loved.
Of a young nation growing strong.
His was an America of glistening rails,
Thundering boxcars and rain-swept nights;
Of lonesome prairies, great mountains
And a high blue sky.
He sang of the bayous and the cotton fields,
The wheated plains, of the little towns,
The cities, and of the winding rivers of America.
We listened, we understood.
JIMMY RODGERS
The singing brakeman - America’s blue yodeler
His Music Will Live Forever
Since Jimmy Rodgers brought the blues into the white parlour, many more young whites have tried to cross the colour line to the blues proper. Fairly typical of the contemporary folk-rover type are Spider John Koerner, Dave Snaker Ray and Little Sun Glover who made a limited edition album in 1963 entitled Blues, Rags and Hollers. They are all of college boy beat cast and the sleeve note pullulates with references to Bunuel, ‘Ingmar Bergman imagery’, ‘Existentialistic Hit Parade’, J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man, Truffaut movies, and with protocol genuflexions to Muddy Waters, Bukka White and bottleneck style. The music is deliberately primitive, in the manner of chain-gang chants and surge-songs, and hoarse with harmonica waitings. The cover shows Spider, Snaker and Little Sun in windcheaters, jeans and sweaters, scuffed instrument cases in hand, apparently waiting for the next freight to smudge the skyline, the ghost train which can’t be exorcized.
Tom Paxton is another young white folk singer who keeps the old fables fresh and, if his listeners know that Olympus is covered with gas stations, he helps to people their imagination with the dryads and fauns of the American Pantheon. His songs are not autobiographical but legend of the American proletarian tide-wrack. Standing on the Edge of Town is about a man cast off the factory line by automation. Now, misput,
he is standing on the edge of town,
Gonna get chilly when the sun goes down
Cardboard suitcase full of my clothes
Where I’m heading just the good Lord knows.
Rambling Boy is a sentimental ballad about a buddy who ‘stuck with me in my hard old days’. They rambled around together in rain and snow, and when once
hunting work in Tulsa town the boss said he had room for one Says my old pal ‘We’d rather bum.’
Then in a jungle camp in winter his pal catches ‘the chills’ and dies:
Here’s to you, my rambling boy, and may your rambling bring you joy,
in the hereafter too.
But I Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound is advice to all those tempted to hit the road to stay put, off that ‘long, dusty road’:
Well, if you see me passing by and you sit and wonder why
And you wish that you were a rambler too
Nail your shoes to the kitchen floor
Lace ‘em up and bar the door,
Thank your stars for the roof that’s over you.
Still Paxton sees no release for the man who has once got on the rambling trail. He bids goodbye to his girl because he’s ‘a mighty restless man in a mighty restless land.’
I have walked, I have bummed,
I have rbde buses. I have rode trains,
I have ridden a time or two in a silver plane.
When I think of where I’ve been I have to go again
Just to see that everything is still the same.
The difference is in saying ‘this is how the story goes’, telling about sharecropping conditions, mine disasters and the Rural Electrification Administration programme, to urban night club audiences, folk festival, television and record audiences, instead of directly feeding back to the hired hands and labourers themselves their own experiences codified. Although there was among many young Americans a post-war awakening to conditions in the nation - dramas not only of the past but those still being struggled through around them - this generation was not involved in a shirt-sleeves way.
Pat Foster has published poetry in the Phoenix Magazine, paints, is a concert performer in East and West Coast television. Similarly Dick Weissman’s nomadism has not been so much through oil field shack towns and grain belt trailer stops, but as a banjo-picker on radio and cabaret folk shows, and his Columbia MA was in sociology. The pieces on their album Documentary Talking Blues are in many cases familiar - from Guthrie and Pete Seeger - and are in the talking blues idiom, that indigenous form of American bucolic poetry in which a seri
es of dry, flatly-delivered acid comments are narrated, not sung, to a simple chord accompaniment of guitar. The talking blues is a mountain man’s soapbox commentary about drought, pellagra, strikes, expressed in litotes or with poker-faced phlegmatic baldness, always with a surprise punch-line, a parenthetical wry wisecrack at the end of each verse.
The Mexican corrido, or newspaper ballad, the Spanish flamenco, the West Indian calypso all use a similar oral strip-cartoon technique for snap-shooting events in action, but the American talking blues has been most effectively used as a political goad, to prod the downtrodden poor into militancy. Unlike the Negro blues, it is not passive but defiant, minatory. Talking Migrant was heard by Foster in the California citrus region and is exceptionally glum and defeatist:
Well, I’m down in Salinas, just pickin’ cotton,
Down in Georgia, just share-cropping.
Wherever you see a broke-down shack,
Dirty kids a-runnin in back,
That’s us ex-landowners
(We’ll never make it… Migratory workers, they call us)
Well, we held our meeting and called our strike
And the cops came by on their motorbikes
Tear-gas hit us, and women were crying,
Children screaming, men a-flying.
(Just a a big melting pot … Never get together, too much struggle to stay where we are)
Picked in Kansas, picked in Maine
When the picking’s done I’m on the road again
Peach bowl, dust bowl, oranges, taters
Berries, apples, celery, tomatoes
(This song is over one minute, and I’ll be on the highway - gone again)
Talking Sharecropper is from some words found, without music, probably improvised by someone jolting along in a flivver out of dust bowl conditions, and has more of the usual belligerence:
Come on Momma, get the boys
We might as well head to Illinois,
Just as bad here, we better head South
Can’t head West on account of the drouth
(That’s bad for us … Can’t take it no more)
Well, come on black man and come on white
And show the rich how the poor can fight
Stand up, woman, and meet a man,
We’re gonna make this country the promised land.
(We’re gonna do it… All together.
Gonna have freedom for everybody)
It is true enough of Jimmy Rodgers that ‘his is the music of America’ in that much of America enjoyed and identified with the style of life reflected in it, but this was a Christmas card version.
The talking blues and the Negro blues contain facts about a rankness of a sub-stratum citizenship - a sort of limited-edition report on the god-forsaken - given ever rawer form by another strain of song. This dealt with suffering and hardship far beyond the woolgathering ache of a heart grown fonder through absence. These songs grew out of the fortunes - the misfortunes - of the great body of unorganized American working men on the move and whose political spearhead became the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW.
The IWW hymnal (for although the lyrics were often savage parodies of the hymns rammed down a hobo’s throat before the soup could follow, they were sacred airs in their own right) expressed with sublime din the most fervent belief that Utopia was the next stop on the American train.
Part Four
Join the wob, wob,
wobbly band
Look at the hands of our people. They are hard and scarred and calloused from trying to make a dream come true.
Big Bill Haywood
My experience is that the greatest aid in the efficiency of labour is a long line of men waiting at the gate.
Samuel Insull
26 Hallelujah, I’m a bum
But singing - Christ, how we sang,
remember the singing
Joe, One Big Union,
One Big
hope to be
With thee.
Kenneth Patchen: Joe Hill Listens To the Praying
‘I’ve quit rambling around this country, I just figure that a boxcar floor would be too hard on my old bones.’
Fred Thompson is sixty-five now but his brush-cut, his galvanic skinniness and his gaiety give him a fifteen-year benefit. He has a steady clerical job, to which he goes and from which he returns each day to the apartment, furnished with bourgeois comfiness, on North Kedzie, Chicago.
For most of his life Fred Thompson has been a Wobbly organizer and agitator. He spent four years in jail, most of the time in San Quentin, after being arrested in April 1923 on his way to a free-speech demonstration in Stockton, California; on his person were IWW documents and leaflets, and he was charged with criminal syndicalism, as were a hundred other Wobs.
Before and after that he rode the freights around America, employed as a copper miner in Montana or digging tunnels in Oregon, wherever conditions were bad and strikes needed provoking - ‘I just moved around, soapboxing and organizing, living on next to nothing, a can of beans and a loaf of bread.’
He began hoboing when he left his home town in New Brunswick at eighteen and crossed into America. ‘I always had a picture of seeing all this country,’ he says. ‘As a kid I felt that before I settled down and got saddled with wife and kids I ought to see this country. The people I associated with didn’t think it strange that you hoboed - they just took it for granted.
‘At that time it would have been thought eccentric for a construction worker to pay a fare to get anywhere. For me the freights were just a practical way of getting to jobs or union assignments. I didn’t hang around the jungles, chewing the fat. I always had a purpose, I was always in a hurry.
‘I used to wonder why a man was going from this town with no work to that town with no work. I decided it was like lemmings. The pressure was to get out of the place where you were having a bad time. Maybe it’s some notion that if you keep shuffling around you’ll fall into a slot somewhere.
‘Now, well, once in a while when some young hobo hits me up for the price of a coffee, I see myself in him, but I wouldn’t say it’s nostalgia I feel. There’s not enough that’s pleasant about the life to want it back.
’You remember Odysseus telling the sailors in the storm at sea that these things will be pleasanter remembered at a future time? Some things which were very unenjoyable at the time make good memories. I like to get a cup of coffee and look out of the window when there’s a severe storm - we look out of a window at the past.
‘That doesn’t mean there weren’t simple joys. I once went from Duluth to Chicago in a gondola loaded with spruce and pine boughs for decoration. It was nice, warm summer time. The odour of that balsam as the sun hit them! The boughs had a spring action. No sultan or emperor ever travelled in greater luxury than I did on that train.
‘But there were some bitterly cold rides. There were times when I damaged the blood vessels in my feet from pounding them to keep the circulation going. And I’ve gone ravenously hungry. I travelled from Chicago to Spokane on seventy-five cents, and lived on beans and some bananas I picked up in the boxcar. There were some hens there. I watched those hens until one laid an egg.
‘But I’ve never really understood why so much glamour is attached to hoboing, because for me it was something you didn’t do unless you had to. Why did I have to ? Well, I suppose it was partly for political reasons and, maybe, yes, because there was something in the life I wanted or needed.’
*
Utopian Socialism arrived in America in the 1820s with Robert Owen, the British reformer, who bought thirty thousand acres of land in Indiana and founded a sort of pilot kibbutz which he named New Harmony. It was based on agriculture, ‘the myth of the garden’ in bud.
Its ideals were those which have so often planted in the breasts of men of goodwill the ruby of hope, which, with doleful inevitability, turns to be a clod of clay. It was to have been a community standing on its own feet, informed by selfless cooperation and
a rational flow of brotherliness. New Harmony fell short of its name. It was wound up in 1828 after three increasingly discordant years, with a personal loss to Owen of £40,000.
Strangely, the nearest any movement in America came to achieving the objects of knightly beatitude was that of a rabble of nomadic roughnecks who had nowhere to call home and no meeting place other than an ever shifting horizon; who created a burning creed, their own psalmody, legend and astonishing code of heroism and chivalry; and who, within a life of monkish asceticism and hardness, fought with fists, boots, guns and sabotage - much of the time to avoid being killed or crushed first, it is true, but also out of the untrammelled belief that all capitalists should be exterminated anyway.
The IWW - the One Big Union of the Wobblies - was as quixotic and impossible as Alice’s step through the looking-glass, yet for a time and for some excluded Americans it was a reality which worked.
The IWW received its contribution from Owen’s ‘new unionism’ as it did in varying parts from many another - mostly semi-digested - political, economic and philosophical theory. It was a gallimaufry of revolutionary Marxism, English Chartism, French Syndicalism, anarchism, nihilism, and the residue of the one-for-all-and-all-for-one militancy of the defunct Knights of Labour.
What came to be the distinguishing lineament of the IWW was its make-up of, in Brissenden’s words, ‘the unskilled and very conspicuously of the migratory and frequently jobless unskilled’. The Wobbly became as token a type as the cowboy or the shanty-man or the keelboatman. He was ‘the genuine rebel, the red-blooded working stiff’.
How I WWs became known as Wobblies is as uncertain as how hobos came to be called hobos. The term seems to have materialized about four years after the official start of the party, and, as is so often the case, first as a term of disapprobation which was scornfully taken over and proudly worn as a cockade in the hat.
The nickname ‘Wibbly-Wobblies’ was sneeringly used of them about that time by the socialist editor of the Cleveland Citizen, but he may not have invented it. (Other unfriendly improvisations upon the letters IWW were I Won’t Work, I Want Whisky, International Wonder Workers and Irresponsible Wholesale Wreckers; an addition made after America entered the war in 1917 was Imperial Wilhelm’s Warriors.) One claim is that they took their tag from the wobbling motion of the boxcars which were their transportation. Yet another explanation, given to me by an old agitator who was up in Canada in 1911 helping to unionize the Grand Trunk Railroad, is that a bunch of strikers were staying in the small town of Kamloops, and did a deal for food and board with a Chinese restaurant owner who could get no nearer the W in pronouncing IWW than ‘wobble’. Newly arrived card-holders began introducing themselves as ‘Wobbly-Wobbly.’ Perhaps the likeliest explanation is that saying IWW out in full must quickly have palled, and that Wobbly was a natural onomatopeic comic contraction.
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