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“Freight Train” is one of the great American songs: it was written by Elizabeth Cotten as a girl of around twelve. But what accounts for its popularity and power?
Everyone loves a song about a train. The song can be experienced on that level alone: the mighty train that “run so fast” as Cotten’s guitar’s alternating bass notes drives it along. Cotten later recounted how she and her brothers waited for the trains to pass in Chapel Hill holding ears to the track to know when it was coming from afar. Her brother would even hang from one of the ties as the train passed over him. However, the chorus also expresses the wish to escape: “please don't tell what train I'm on/they won’t know what route I'm going.” These lines resonate with centuries of African-American struggle for freedom: the escape from slavery, the Underground Railroad (not a literal railroad, but the metaphor is significant). This is the identification of a girl with her own people's struggles, though the song might also be any child's fantasy of escape from home. The verses, however, present a counter-theme to the speedy train of the chorus. The song shifts from life on earth to life in the earth: “when I'm dead and in my grave/no more good times here I crave/place the stones at my head and feet/and tell them all that I've gone to sleep.” Rock solid, these lines, as poetry. Every word is a monosyllable! But what do they mean? The verses of “Freight Train” are religious: they confront ultimate things. They also assert an attachment to place. The emphasis on interment (’in my grave’) flies in the face of Christian doctrine and contains a hint of paganism. To the Greeks the dead were sleepers, the exhausted ones, the laboring ones. Whitman also wrote of the dead as “Sleepers.” Hamlet imagines death as a sleep. What happened to the train? Has its passing suggested death? Or has it simply been forgotten? The body, whether alive or dead in its place in the earth, will hear the train: “Then I can hear old #9/ as she comes rolling by.” A common folk theme treats bodies in place as still possessing a quasi-life. Many folk songs are about dying people saying where they wish to be buried and where they don't. The ultimate placement of bones is never a matter of indifference. “Bury me not on the lone Prairie” comes to mind. One thinks also of Sam Mcgee’s self-immolation in fire, a kind of immortality. We know Christianity played a big part in Elizabeth Cotten's life from the time she joined the Baptist church as a teenager. She would have sung many a hymn about the righteous going to heaven, but in her songs, she was able to imagine things a little differently. Interestingly, her other most famous song, “Shake Sugaree,” presents a subtly irreverent view of the afterlife. According to the liner notes, Elizabeth did not herself compose the verses but encouraged her grandchildren to do so. One of them came up with the following: Have a little secret ain’t gonna tell I'm going to heaven in a brown pea shell Here, heaven is not a reward for good behavior. Entry is unconditional and occurs by means of magic. In the warm atmosphere of the family, unconditional acceptance reigns. ‘Oh Babe, It Ain’t No Lie’ also stands up for the child and her world. As Cotten tells the story, a neighbor friend, one Miss Mary, told Cotten’s mother that she had sassed her, talked back, but it wasn’t true. As punishment, her mother said she wasn’t allowed to leave the yard. She composed the song out of her hurt feelings and then sang it on the porch so Miss Mary would hear. The song is unsparing in its expression of strong feeling. She wishes “that old woman would die.” The chorus has a slightly more oblique connection to the story, and the words are unclear: “Oh babe it ain’t no lie/this ol’ life I’m livin’ is very hard” was always my understanding of the words, but Mike Seeger’s liner notes give “this old life I’m living is very high.” An unusual expression (folk songs are often saying life is hard) which makes a better rhyme and better sense, too, if we consider the circumstances. Miss Mary’s criticism might well have included the idea that she was “low,” in which case her reply may be taken as a retort. The second verse continues the argument, illustrating the high life Cotten is leading. She “has been around the whole round world.” Not only that, but she is prepared to make sacrifices for a loved one on return, spending and giving all her money to an unspecified “hon.” Instead of the spiteful backbiting of neighbors, she imagines a life of noble deeds, adventure, generosity. It is tempting to see this as an offering to her mother, the main figure in her life at that time, and the person responsible for her punishment. As it turns out, Cotton worked with her mother cleaning houses and cooking for a white family in Chapel Hill in difficult conditions. As a minor, she would turn over her earnings to her mother. Not that Cotten’s lyrics can be reduced to her biography. But it’s worth trying to ground them in her circumstances.
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Dan Sofaer
Musician, scholar, educator ArchivesCategories |