Music & Trains
When So Percussion was first approached about coming up to Southern Vermont during the summer, we almost didn’t need to hear what it was for. Since being in residence at the Yellow Barn Festival in 2004, we were bound and determined to find any excuse to get back to the Brattleboro Bookstores and Putney’s Front Porch for any length of time. Even though we would have come up for a tire-treading conference if asked, this project seemed special. When Danny Lichtenfeld, a friend from our time at Yellow Barn, started explaining the idea of site-specific music at train stations, our minds began to wander…
The connection of trains with music is a treasured part of America’s cultural memory. Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues captures the frustration of prison and the freedom that a train symbolizes:
I hear the train a comin’
It’s rollin’ ’round the bend,
And I ain’t seen the sunshine,
Since, I don’t know when,
I’m stuck in Folsom Prison,
And time keeps draggin’ on,
But that train keeps a-rollin’,
On down to San Antone.
Throughout the whole song, the snare drum plays chu-ga CHU-ga chu-ga CHU-ga to describe the rumbling rhythm on the tracks.
In Steve Goodman’s City of New Orleans, America claims the train as its own lifeblood:
Good morning, America, how are you?
Don’t you know me I’m your native son,
I’m the train they call The City of New Orleans,
I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
Trains in America were the arteries of the economy, their stations the sites of most comings and goings. The noisy, lumbering figures represented both the thrill of mobility and the fear of industrial momentum.
Other cool train-related music:
Steve Reich: Different Trains
A beautiful piece written for the Kronos String Quartet. Reich reflects on cross-country train rides from his youth, as well as the very different rides other Jewish kids were taking in Europe at the same time:
Pierre Schaeffer: etude aux chemins de fer
Schaeffer pioneered the art of Musique Concrète in 1948, a method of combining recorded sounds on magnetic tape to make new pieces. His first experiment was with train sounds:
As we spend time in the Brattleboro and Bellows Falls communities this summer, we don’t know yet for sure what’s going to come out. We’re not only exploring trains, either. The industrial activity of 150 years left Southern Vermont with paper mills, an organ factory, and some pretty great canals. Somehow it all tells a story.
One Comment
Good to see your post mentioning “City of New Orleans” by Steve Goodman. He often doesn’t get his due. You might be interested in my 800-page biography, “Steve Goodman: Facing the Music.” The book delves deeply into the genesis of “City of New Orleans,” and Arlo Guthrie, who first made it a hit, is a key source among my 1,050 interviewees and even contributed the foreword.
You can find out more at my Internet site (below). Amazingly, the book’s first printing sold out in just eight months, all 5,000 copies, and a second printing of 5,000 is available now. The second printing includes hundreds of little updates and additions, including 30 more photos for a total of 575. To order a second-printing copy, see the “online store” page of my site. Just trying to spread word about the book. Feel free to do the same!
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