All Aboard: Steel Rails and Mystery Train

Riding the rails, hopping freight trains, and hearing the whistle blow are themes that have been as central to American song over the years as they have to the history of travel in the US. So Rounder has done a great service for those of us attuned to romancing the railways by releasing Steel Rails and Mystery Train, two winning compilations of locomotive tunes from folk, bluegrass, and country artists.

Compiled by Michael Hyatt, and inspired by folklorist Norm Cohen's currently out-of-print Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (University of Illinois Press), the 14 songs on each CD carry a lot of weight. Perhaps a quarter of the selections are about just trains. The rest provides a dazzling demonstration of how much metaphoric and symbolic information the image of the train conveys, with most performances robustly sung, plucked, fiddled, and strummed.

The most literal-minded songs tend to be the most forgettable. There's a soupçon of mawkish sentimentality in Utah Phillips's "Daddy, What's a Train?", where a child implausibly asks: "Is it something I can ride?" The same fitful nostalgia marks Tom Russell's "Lord of the Trains," an overblown hymn to some middle-class folkie's fantasy of hobo life. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise intelligently programmed collection.

High points include several songs where the train symbolizes a vehicle of spiritual salvation, as in Patsy Cline's "Life's Railway to Heaven" and the Sons of the Pioneers' "When the Golden Train Comes Down." Secular love is a more common theme, with singers describing escaping old lovers, or having lovers escape, with all due speed. "Mystery Train" is an archetypal anthem celebrating this motif, and rockabilly songster Sleep LaBeef does a devout cover (though Elvis was last seen in Harvard Square, on his way to Rounder headquarters, kvetching that no one but the King should record it).

That modern masterpiece of train folk songs, "The City of New Orleans," is offered in the definitive version by its composer, Steve Goodman. Here is the ideal railroad song, fusing nostalgia, romance, escapism, reportage, populist politics, and a touch of just fun. The spirit of glee is found on one of three instrumentals, Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn's "Take the `A' Train," as laughably "countrified" by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys. Call it a minor miracle that a Harlem-bound subway train can jump the rails to Nashville, with honky-tonk piano and whining steel guitar licks bounding.

The separate packaging of the two discs is a little strange -- releasing them together in a single box might have been a better idea. Since the selections follow no chronology or narrative structure, there's no logic distinguishing Steel Rails from Mystery Train. What would be nice, though, is a companion compilation of jazz and blues railroad tunes, beginning with Trixie Smith's "Freight Train Blues" and progressing to Thelonious Monk's "Locomotive." And there's a lot more where those came from.

-- Norm Weinstein