Part 5.
There is another song on the album very similar in mood and theme, "The L&N Don't Stop Here Anymore". In this case, it's not a natural desaster that deprives people of their homes and meaningful lives but the closing of a coal mine in Kentucky, the Hazard Hollow.
Exactly. Nobody forces anybody to leave, but there is no sense in staying either since the place is absolutely dead, a ghost town shrouded in despair and haunted by coal miners' ghosts with snow-white faces. When the singer was little, his father warned him not to continue in the family tradition and become a miner like his own father and himself, but I guess he refused to believe that anything might change in their traditional way of life, which is always a mistake, especially if big business interests are involved. Again, I see this song as a metaphor for being in the wrong place, or no place at all, even though - unlike in "Backwater Blues" - it's the place you used to call home not too long ago, which must be even more painful. There's a more recent song by Bruce Springsteen about the decline of the steel industry in Youngstown, Ohio. He must have written that with Jean Ritchie's song in mind. I think there is actually a reference to the coal mines of Appalachia in it.
Jean Ritchie is the woman who wrote "The L&N"?
Yes. Ritchie is a really interesting and impressive woman. She must be about 80 years old now and still does a few public performances from time to time. She grew up in Viper, Kentucky, in the heart of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, so I guess she knows what she's talking about. After getting her degree in social work she went to New York and worked in the famous Henry Street Settlement where she played traditional songs to entertain the children in her charge. Her reputation as a folk singer grew pretty quickly and she was asked to perform more formally. For folk music fans of the 1940s, Ritchie represented the ideal traditional perfomer: She grew up in the mountains of Kentucky, sang songs that she learned from her family, and played a little known instrument called a dulcimer. Her growing influence is actually best shown by the fact that dulcimers, previously relatively exotic instruments in New York, began selling at a brisk rate.
Trains and train imagery are quite pervasive in American folk and blues music and on Another Man Done Gone as well: John Hardy tries to escape his persecutors by hopping a train, the dumped lover in "Sittin' On Top Of The World" ends up riding a freight train to forget and then there's the L&N and the "Orange Blossom Special." That was a big hit for Johnny Cash in the sixties, wasn't it?
Yep, and Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison is where I actually got the song from. But it's originally a bluegrass tune. In 1938 the Seaboard Air Line's "Orange Blossom Special" became Florida's first streamlined train. Bluegrass fiddlers Ervin T. Rouse and Chubby Wise went to Union Station to see it and made up this tune afterwards. To his subsequent regret Wise relinquished all claim to it. It was first recorded by the Rouse Brothers in 1939, and has since been performed and recorded by numerous other groups. I always liked the jumpy, train-like rhythm. And again, here's somebody itchin' to go someplace else, lose those New York blues, with the shiny new train as promise and possibility.
