Train-wreck ballads - songs that relate the grisly stories of railroad accidents - spread like wildfire as railroad carnage began to pile up in the South. In the 1880s, the Southern network doubled in mileage, and these new railroads became a cornerstone to the image of a New South reborn from the ashes of war. Virgil turns his back on the railroad and heads home to “work the land,” but in the decades after the war, railroads became even more essential to the South. But Virgil’s story is still representative of the personal struggles faced by Confederate veterans. The song unfortunately flirts with Lost Cause mythologies about the Confederacy in its focus on the white Southern experience - at the same time Virgil trudged home, African Americans across the South were celebrating emancipation and the arrival of northern troops. The Confederacy made quite effective use of its internal rail network, but these railroads became key targets of Union generals like Stoneman and Sherman, who left the twisted wreckage of rails and ties in the wake of their marches. Southern railroads were central to the drama of the Civil War. Virgil Caine finds himself out of a job after Stoneman’s cavalry tears up the tracks of the “Danville train,” meaning the Richmond & Danville system. As the images of the railroad and the South have merged, trains and railroad infrastructure now form part of a panoply of “down home” Southern images, existing easily in the imaginary landscape of pickup trucks, cowboy hats, old country stores, and wholesome small towns that provides the setting for much of Nashville pop-country. Thankfully, both Southern and national artists are now much more willing to take an unflinching look at these historic injustices, yet the trope of the South as a land behind time has persisted. The songs, like all “Old South” mythology, whitewashed the horrors of slavery and the Jim Crow era. Those songs, of course, perpetuated pernicious myths about our region. In her 2013 book Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture, historian Karen Cox argues that in reaction to the anxieties of early 20th century modernity, artists and audiences from outside the South helped perpetuate myths about the region as a slow-moving land of “moonlight and magnolias.” To go to Dixie in a song of this era was to escape to a safe, pre-industrial world, where plantations were romantic places filled with happy, singing slaves.
Railroads once represented the height of modernity, but after decades of declining passenger traffic and abandonments, they now signify a bygone era. More than just a reflection of Southern history, the evolution of the Southern train song also speaks to the various meanings American pop culture has placed on both the South and the railroad. Perhaps it is this ambivalent relationship to the railroad and the peculiarly Southern penchant for storytelling that gave Southerners so many train topics and legends to sing about?
Railroads also aided the spread of disease, attracted violent robbers like Jesse James, and consolidated into monopolistic behemoths. White and black Southerners were entranced by the railroad and yearned for new connections, but Southern railroads were dangerous and deadly for passengers and workers. Southern train songs directly reflect the South’s distinctively magical and destructive history with the railroads - the very subject I was researching and writing. While this at first seemed to be a slightly obsessive diversion from the book, explaining the South’s predilection for train songs eventually became critical to the project. I stumbled into this connection between train songs and the South while building a playlist of train songs to accompany my research and writing for a history of Southern railroading. The railroad has long been a powerful cultural symbol for Americans.Īnd most of these train songs are sung with Southern accents. During his explorations in the rural South in the 1910s and 20s, folklorist Howard Odum marveled at how African American musicians performed train songs that simulated the noises of speeding locomotives. While some songs use trains as passing metaphors, others feature railroads as key plot devices (e.g., the train that takes your lover away), and some go so far as to emulate the distinctive rhythms and sounds of the rail. From the earliest days of railroading, American music has been unable to resist the lure of the locomotive.
0 kommentar(er)
