Includes fourteen-page booklet with notes on songs.
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about
This song was one of four recorded in Dallas by Newton Gaines in October, 1929. Gaines was an academic, which makes him unusual among so-called “hillbilly” recording artists of the day. He had published a piece on cowboy songs for the Texas Folklore Society and would later become chair of the Physics department at Texas Christian University.
According to D. K. Wilgus, who re-issued “Wreck of the Six-Wheeler” as part of the path-breaking RCA Victor Vintage Series in 1967, Gaines learned it in 1910 from a student at the University of Texas. The student, who was white, had gotten it sometime before from African-American singers living near Paris, Texas.
The song is connected to the 1909 vaudeville hit “Casey Jones,” but not through direct lineage. Norm Cohen, the world’s leading authority on the railroad in folk song, has written that fragments of the version Gaines sang were current among African-American singers even before 1900. Anyway, Gaines’ sources had never heard “Casey Jones.”
For me, the mournful pace of the song is just right. It is, after all, recounting a fatal train wreck.
To be “on the Charlie” meant to be a hobo, to be “on the bum.”
lyrics
Monday morning it began to rain.
’Round the curve come a passenger train.
On the Charlie was old Jimmie Jones.
He’s a good old rounder, but he’s dead and gone.
He’s dead and gone, he’s dead and gone.
Been on the Charlie so long.
Now, Joseph Michael was a good engineer,
Told his fireman weather not to fear.
All he wanted, keep her good and hot.
We’ll make a pass about four o’clock.
About four o’clock, about four o’clock,
I been on the Charlie so long.
Now, when we was about a mile out the place,
Number One stared us right in the face.
Fireman look at this watch and he mumbled and said,
“We may make it, but we’ll all be dead.
“Well all be dead, we’ll all be dead,
And I been on the Charlie so long.”
When the two locomotives was about to bump,
Fireman was preparing for to make his jump.
Engineer blowed the whistle and the fireman bawled,
“Oh, Mister conductor won’t you save us all.”
“Oh, save us all, won’t you save us all,
And I been on the Charlie so long.”
Oh, you oughta been there for to see the sight,
Running and a-screaming, both colored and white.
Some was crippled and some was lame,
But the six-wheel driver had to bear the blame.
He had to bear the blame, he had to bear the blame,
He’d been on the Charlie so long.
Now, ain’t it a pity and ain’t it a shame,
That the six-wheel driver had to bear the blame.
He’d been on the Charlie so long.
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