"It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and the Death of the Train Song

No doubt anyone reading this can instantly conjure up the mental image--sound effects and all--of a steam train leaving the station: the heavy sideways barrel of the big iron engine, the thick black smoke coiling out of the stack, the churning of the wheels, the sound of the whole massive device as it picks up speed, slowly at first, then steady, even, steel grinding steel. Though the steam engine was common over most of the world, this is an archetypal American image, at least for those of us who grew up in the U.S. within proximity of a television set. The chugging of the train is the very soundtrack of Manifest Destiny, the rude chorus of American mythology. I'm racking my brain, trying to determine if I've ever actually seen a real live steam-powered train in action. I can't say for sure that I have, but the image is so natural to me that it seems as though I must have seen it a thousand times, not just on TV.

Before television--and even after it, for some time--we had the train song. In the popular tradition, folk songs about trains go back to long before the concept of authorship mattered in songwriting. Among scores of others, the list includes "The Wreck of the Old 97," "The FFV," "Rock Island Line," and even "In the Pines," with its image of "the longest train I ever saw" that carried away the only girl that the speaker ever loved. I think especially, though, of Johnny Cash's version of "Orange Blossom Special," not only because of its use of a chugging acoustic guitar and snare drum rhythm that approximates the sound of a train in motion but also because it features the harmonica instead of the fiddle, which dominates most other versions of the song. There is something about the sound of the harmonica that goes with train songs, that mimics the sound of the speeding object itself.

In 1965, Bob Dylan unofficially heralded what I like to call the Death of Folk Music. Symbolically, the moment of this announcement might be considered Dylan's performance at the Newpoert Folk Festival on July 25, when he appeared on stage with an electric guitar and an electrified backing band. Dylan himself may not have intended any grand pronouncement at the time on the viability of folk music; indeed, the following year, Dylan stated in an interview for Playboy that folk songs "are not going to die." The songs themselves may never die, but the people who sing them do, unfortunately, and the ranks of those who qualify as authentic folk musicians have grown thinner and thinner from one decade to the next.

In its purest form, folk music might be defined as music that emerges spontaneously from among the populace--generally from non-professionals--and is by and large free of the influences of the commercial recording media. It could be argued whether "folk" music that does not fit these criteria is even folk music at all. To be recorded, folk musicians generally have to be sought out by ethnomusicologists. If such a thing as pure folk music still exists in the U.S., it does so in miniscule pockets isolated throughout rural regions of the country. Of course, there are traditions in music--blues (especially Delta blues), country, and bluegrass--that have very strong, close ties to folk music, but the terms of these idioms are decidedly different because of the influence commercial interstests have had on them.

By 1960, the existence of pure folk had become quite perilous because of the pervasive influence of commercial recording and because of broad-scale changes in society that meant that few people lived outside of such influence. That year, Bob Dylan set out to New York (of all places) to become a folk singer. He failed to do so, in a way, because the very act of aspiring to become a professional folk singer is an impossibility, or at least a contradiction in terms (Dylan's idol, Woody Guthrie, notwithstanding), and I think that it was Dylan's increasing awareness of this situation--whether consciously or below the surface of his thought--that caused him in 1965 to radically alter his approach to writing and performing his music. The more blatant change in his music was in the transition to the electric guitar (which, it must be noted, did not entirely push out the acoustic guitar, especially on rhythm tracks). The other change--less noticeable at first, but ultimately perhaps more profound--was in the lyrics, which were more abstract and dreamlike on 1965's Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan's first album that featured the electric guitar (which was dominant on all but the last four tracks on the album), but pervaded increasingly by irony, even cynicism, on the follow-up album, Highway 61 Revisited, which also appeared in 1965. Dylan had begun increasingly to hide himself behind the veneer of irony in both his lyrics and in interviews--to the point that the irony that had at first seemed persona had become part of his identity, it seemed.

If Highway 61 Revisited is part of the Death of Folk Music, Dylan's version of the train song that appears on this album, "It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry," is nothing less than the Death of the Train Song. It's a meta-train song that borrows some floaters from songs gone by, but it is also, to some extent, a song about the inability to write a true and authentic train song. The train song is a kind of song that's impossible to write now, at least not with the same genuine sense of earnestness that pervaded those earlier takes.

As I write this, I can hear the whistle of a freight train off in the distance. It's a diesel engine, of course, but the whistle, I think, must sound the same. I can't imagine it taking my baby away, it's not the soundtrack to my own sorrows, but it is, as Hank Williams and so many others had it, lonesome indeed.