Railroad Songs
Making note of the little things in life is important, because even if we’re lucky, little things are mostly all we get. And it’s important because it’s like Winston Churchill said, “Fate turns on small hinges”.
For decades I’ve run a used-record store in Maine that’s known for a wide array of unusual stuff, and during the holiday season last year, some guy came in with a request that was both specific and general. He hoped to find a recording of a particular classical piece, but any performance of it would do. I promptly presented the man with three choices.
With that request nailed down lickety-split, he browsed around and from my “traditional folk” section picked out a copy of Railroad Songs & Ballads, a decades-old collection of on-the-spot recordings of ordinary people singing topical songs acquired from their cultural or social backgrounds. Under the auspices of the Library of Congress, the recordings were made, compiled and released by the Archive of American Folk Song.
The Archive, established by the Library of Congress Music Division in 1928, dedicated itself to collecting and preserving recordings from the earliest days of recorded sound. And looking to the future, it eventually employed a large staff of “song hunters” who’d search in public places for people with knowledge of regional folk songs, recording anyone they deemed worthy. Alan Lomax is undoubtedly the best-known of this crew, but for anyone looking into it, his name will open that door only a crack.
But I digress.
While the Railroad Songs record was an esoteric choice, I presumed it was merely curiosity sparked by a random find. That is, until my man mentioned that his great-grandfather, while a young man, had worked in railroading in Eastern Pennsylvania in the years between the end of World War I and the Depression.
I’ve always had an affinity for tidbits of history and small pieces of a larger cultural puzzle, and he must have detected a glimmer of interest on my part as he launched into more detail about his great-grandfather.
It was a story built on a dark 1930s framework of Depression-era hardship. Abrupt unemployment. Destitution. Dislocation. In company with many thousands of others, he rode the rails for a few years and got work wherever and whenever he could, all over the country.
Along the way he picked up a guitar, taught himself to play, and with time and effort came to the life of a minstrel and street singer. This, despite losing a thumb in the trenches in World War I. And so it was with his newfound vocation that he ultimately gravitated back to his roots, in the coal fields of Eastern Pennsylvania.
He played and sang wherever and whenever he could — in coal camps and in bars, on the street, and occasionally, even down in the mines, entertaining miners as they worked! It was also in Eastern Pennsylvania that he met my man’s great-grandmother.
As the narrative unfolded further, there was mention of family lore, a tale that the geezer had recorded one of his songs for someone from the Library of Congress. With a lot of digging around, my man had once found a snippet of the song on YouTube. But it was only a snippet.
While he’s telling me all this, I’m thinking of another Archive record I was pretty sure I had in my back room, in my little stash of Library of Congress titles that I try to always have on hand. Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miners would be bound to pique his interest, being a record of field recordings of Depression-era songs from the coal fields of Eastern Pennsylvania. (For the uninitiated, anthracite is the highest grade, or rank, of coal. It’s the hardest, burns the hottest, longest and cleanest, and even today, fetches the highest price.)
His enthusiasm for the subject was still building when, without fanfare, I excused myself for a minute. The geezer’s name hadn’t been mentioned, so I couldn’t know just what I had, but as I emerged from my back room and handed him the record, my man was ecstatic when he found his great-grandfather’s song on side one, track one!
The copy I had also included its original — and nearly impossible to find — meticulously detailed notes, including performers’ names, song titles, complete lyrics, recording dates and locations, etc.
He politely declined my offer to play the record for him, opting instead to hear it for the first time at home, with his family.
Fate’s small hinges were well oiled that day.
