Wife and I couldn’t sleep last night, we were all excited about getting to sign our tax returns and pay the IRS some money. We were trying to sleep, but kept asking Siri to play stuff on Apple music, which isn’t as bad as it sounds, since Siri knows how to Airplay to Sonos. After half an hour of discussing how us boomers that remember the Beatles starting the British Invasion when we were about 10 grew up with better music than all of the young people now that mostly get explicit urban music or country music product.
After a few trips down memory lane, I asked Siri to play “The Train They Call the City of New Orleans”, and pretty soon Arlo was on singing Steve Goodman’s masterpiece. I’ve heard a lot of train songs in my day, but none are better than this. I’ve never ridden that train, but I have ridden other overnighters on North to South routes. Lots of people don’t seem to realize that this is an actual train. When I took Amtrack in to Philly from Lancaster and then waiting for the Keystone back home, I’d often see the big information board.
This is how it typically looks, but once a day in each direction, there appears the legend “City of New Orleans”.
No other song captures the spirit.
Riding on the City of New Orleans
Illinois Central, Monday morning rail
Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders
Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail
All along the southbound odyssey
The train pulls out at Kankakee
And rolls along past houses, farms and fields
Passing trains that have no name
And freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles
[Chorus]
Good morning America, how are you
Say, 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
Dealing card games with the old men in the club car
Penny a point, ain’t no one keeping score
Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle
Feel the wheels rumbling ‘neath the floor
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their fathers’ magic carpets made of steel
And mothers with their babes asleep
Are rockin’ to the gentle beat
And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel
Nighttime on the City of New Orleans
Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee
Half way home, we’ll be there by morning
Through the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea
But all the towns and people seem
To fade into a bad dream
And the steel rail still ain’t heard the news
The conductor sings his songs again
The passengers will please refrain
This train got the disappearing railroad blues
