1. Five hundred miles
"500 Miles" (also known as "500 Miles Away from Home" or "Railroaders' Lament") is a folk song made popular in the United States and Europe during the 1960s folk revival. The simple repetitive lyrics offer a lament by a traveller who is far from home, out of money and too ashamed to return. The song is generally credited as being written by Hedy West, while some sources also credit Bobby Bare, Curly Williams, and/or John Phillips as co-writers.
West is said to have learned a version of the song as a child from her paternal grandmother Lillie Mulkey West. "500 Miles" is thought to be related to the older folk song, "900 Miles," which may itself have origins in a southern American fiddle tune called "Reuben's Train."
Hedy West was a singer and banjo-player who came from a North Carolina folksinging family, so perhaps she formalised the song for publication and others then changed the words somewhat in order to create a more popular version and gain some writing credits. Hedy West died on 3 July, 2005, aged 67.
"500 Miles" is West's "most anthologized song." The first release of the song appears to have been on the 1961 self-titled debut by the Journeymen. It charted as a hit single by American country music singer Bobby Bare in 1963. It has also been recorded by many artists including a.o. Peter, Paul & Mary, The Kingston Trio, The Brothers Four and many others.
2. What are the Origins of this song ?
Apparently this song goes back quite further than Hedy West’s version.
We need to go back to a definition of folk music: “Before 1945, Ledbetter liked to say, you could tell which side of a ridge a banjo player was from. After 1945, most just played like Earl Scruggs” (New Yorker, April 28, p. 56). Beyond that pointing, what’s folk remains unclear.
Yet variation is characteristic of folk. The author of folk music is not anonymous as much as communal. Folk songs are created by a community, passed down and sent away, and come to rest in other places, changing shape to suit local needs. A key characteristic of folk music therefore includes improvisation. A contemporary example is Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” the lyrics augmented and modified in many covers. This is the reason why Bob Dylan rarely sings his own songs the same way twice. When folk passes on from the community to the individual, its defining characteristic of variation is lost.
“900 Miles” morphed into “500 Miles”.
It’s a train song, a folk shape, and the folk musician understands the form can be filled with any number of miles, train rides, destinations and lonely whistles. Keys change to suit voice and instrument; words change to update the form to contemporary, local needs. We find examples of this morphing in literature: Huckleberry Finn turns up in Holden Caulfield; Melville’s Ishmael gets a nod from Vonnegut’s Jonah; Romeo and Juliet sing Maria and Tony in West Side Story; the Henry of Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage meets Hemingway’s in A Farewell to Arms. The origins of literature are found in the origins of folk music. The individual relocates traditions. At the end of the cycle, the individual disappears back into the folk community, the folk song re-emerging as something new. (Burkhar Bilger in “The New Yorker” (April 28, 2008)
3. Nine Hundred Miles
In its present form, this is a hillbilly blues. However, Woody Guthrie, the Okie balladeer and guitar-picker, learned it from a Negro shoeshine boy in his home town of Okema, Oklahoma.
The tune has appeared in many disguises and has relations all over the South. In the tidewater country of Virginia, they call it the "Reuben Blues" and they sing:
When old Reuben left home, he wasn't but nine days old, When he come back he was a full grown man.
When he come back he was a full grown man.
They got old Reuben down and they took his watch and charm,
It was everything that poor boy had.
It was everything that poor boy had.
Bob Dylan’s “I was young when I left home” is a good example of a “Collection song” based a.o. on this Guthrie version.
In the backwoods, further west, the sharecroppers, white and black, dedicate the tune to a full belly, and sing:
I got my chickens in my sack and the hounds are on my track.
But I'll make it to my shanty 'fore day,
And I'll keep my skillet good and greasy all the time.
Up in Kentucky and Tennessee, they tell the story about a train that ran around a notorious coal mine, where convict labor was used in the old days:
The longest train that I ever seen,
Run around Joe Brown's coal mine,
The engine past (sic) at six o'clock,
And the last car passed by at nine.
Today, the oldest direct relation seems to be Fiddlin’ John Carson’s recording of “I’m nine hundred miles from home” (1924).
Again, this is a “collection” song. This songs seems to collect verses from other traditional songs known at the time “Butcher’s Boy”, “Jesse James”, etc.
4. “R(e)uben's Train”
Ol Reuben made a train & he put it on a track
He ran it to the Lord knows where
Oh me, oh my ran it to the Lord knows where
Should been in town when Reuben's train went down
You could hear that whistle blow 100 miles
Oh me, oh my you could hear the whistle blow 100 miles
Last night I lay in jail had no money to go my bail
Lord how it sleeted & it snowed
Oh me, oh my Lord how it sleeted & it snowed
I've been to the East, I've been to the West
I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow
Oh me, oh my I'm going where the chilly winds don't blow
Oh the train that I ride is 100 coaches long
You can hear the whistle blow 100 miles
Oh me, oh my you can hear the whistle blow 100 miles
I got myself a blade, laid Reuben in the shade,
I'm startin' me a graveyard of my own.
Oh, me, oh lordy my, startin' me a graveyard of my own.
This song is a straight forerunner to the “900 Miles” song.
Traditional Appalachian stuff, played on the clawhammer banjo.
I joined a version by Dock Boggs, and the oldest recording by Emry Arthur.
5. “Train 45”
This is another classic “Train Song” based on the same feeling. Numerous bluegrass players - a.o. Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers - performed it. Carter Stanley (Ruby Rakes) claims to have written the lyrics, but again, it’s a collection song, and nobody really can be pointed as the author.
I joined a version by “Grayson & Whitter” and “The New Lost City Ramblers”
6. “In the Pines”
Perhaps the oldest of all versions is the Southern mountain song of the dark (black) girl.
Wherever this melody has turned up, it has been a vehicle for melancholy, for a yearning toward faraway places and toward things that are lost and irretrievable. In "Nine Hundred Miles," it has become the most haunting of railroad blues.
Like numerous other folk songs, "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" was passed on from one generation and locale to the next by word of mouth. The first printed version of the song, compiled by Cecil Sharp, appeared in 1917, and comprised just four lines and a melody. The lines are:
Black girl, black girl, don't lie to me
Where did you stay last night?
I stayed in the pines where the sun never shines
And shivered when the cold wind blows
In 1925, a version of the song was recorded onto phonograph cylinder by a folk collector. This was the first documentation of "The Longest Train" variant of the song. This variant include a stanza about "The longest train I ever saw". "The Longest Train" stanzas probably began as a separate song that later merged into "Where Did You Sleep Last Night". Lyrics in some versions about "Joe Brown's coal mine" and "the Georgia line" may date it to Joseph E. Brown, a former Governor of Georgia, who famously leased convicts to operate coal mines in the 1870s. While early renditions that mention that someone's "head was found in the driver's wheel" make clear that the train caused the decapitation, some later versions would drop the reference to the train and reattribute the cause. Music historian Norm Cohen, in his 1981 book "Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong," states the song came to consist of three frequent elements: a chorus about "in the pines", a stanza about "the longest train" and a stanza about a decapitation, though not all elements are present in all versions.
Starting the year following the 1925 recording, commercial recordings of the song were done by various "hillbilly" bands. In a 1970 dissertation, Judith McCulloh found 160 permutations of the song. As well as rearrangement of the three frequent elements, the person who goes into the pines or who is decapitated has been described as a man, a woman, an adolescent, a wife, a husband or a parent, while the pines have represented sexuality, death or loneliness. The train has been described killing a loved one, as taking one's beloved away or as leaving an itinerant worker far from home.
In variants in which the song describes a confrontation, the person being challenged is always a woman, and never a man. The Kossoy Sisters folk version asks, "Little girl, little girl, where'd you stay last night? Not even your mother knows." The reply to one version's "Where did you get that dress, and those shoes that are so fine?" is "from a man in the mines, who sleeps in the pines." The theme of a woman who has been caught doing something she should not is thus also common to many variants. One variant, sang in the early twentieth century by the Ellison clan (Ora Ellison, deceased) in Lookout Mountain Georgia, told of the rape of a young Georgia girl, who fled to the pines in shame. Her rapist, a male soldier, was later beheaded by the train. Mrs. Ellison had stated that it was her belief that the song was from the time shortly after the civil war.
The oldest version of this goes back to the Peg Leg Howell blues “Rolling Mill Blues”.
Other famous versions are : Leadbelly, Doc Watson, The Louvin Brothers…
The song was strangely enough also recorded by The Journeymen under the title : “Black Girl”, which brings us back to where we began, and close the circle.
This is what I gathered:
1924 - Fiddlin John Carson - I'm Nine Hundred Miles from Home
1929 - Grayson & Whitter - - Train 45
1929 - Peg Leg Howell - Rolling Mill Blues
1930 - Emry Arthur - Reuben Oh Reuben
1935 - Leadbelly - Where Did You Sleep Last Night
1945 - Woody Guthrie - 900 Miles (BBC Recording Children's hour)
1953 - Cisco Houston & Woody Guthrie - 900 Miles
1953 - Red Smiley - 900 Miles
1959 - The New Lost City Ramblers - Train 45
1961 - Barbara Dane - Nine Hundred Miles
1961 - The Journeymen - 500 Miles
1961 - The Journeymen - Black Girl
1962 - Bob Dylan - I Was Young When I Left Home (Home recording)
1962 - Kingston Trio - 500 Miles
1962 - Lonnie Donegan - 500 Miles Away From Home
1962 - Mac Wiseman - In the Pines
1962 - Peter, Paul and Mary - 500 Miles
1963 - Bobby Bare - Five Hundred Miles
1963 - Dock Boggs - Ruben's Train
1963 - Hedy West - 500 Miles
1963 - Hoyt Axton - Five Hundred Miles
1963 - Odetta - Sings Folk Songs - 01 900 miles
1963 - The Brothers Four - 500 Miles
1964 - Peter and Gordon - 500 Miles
1964 - The Seekers - Five Hundred Miles
1965 - Bert Jansch - 900 Miles
1965 - The Shadows - Five hundred miles
1969 - Dion - 900 Miles
1996 - The Persuasions - Five Hundred Miles
2006 - Doghouse Roses - 900 Miles
2006 - Jack Pearson - Nine Hundred Miles
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