This old engine
makes it on time
Leaves Central Station
at a quarter to nine
Hits River Junction
at seventeen to
at a quarter to ten
you know it’s trav’lin’ again
Drivin’ that train
High on Cocaine
Casey Jones, you better1
watch your speed
Trouble ahead
and you know that notion
just crossed my mind
Trouble ahead
The Lady in Red2
Take my advice
you be better off dead
Switchman sleepin’
Train hundred and two
is on the wrong track and
headed for you
Drivin’ that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones you better
watch your speed
Trouble ahead
Trouble behind
and you know that notion
just crossed my mind
Trouble with you is
The trouble with me
Got two good eyes
but we still don’t see
Come ’round the bend
You know it’s the end
The fireman screams and
The engine just gleams
Drivin’ that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones you better
watch your speed
Trouble ahead
Trouble behind
and you know that notion
just crossed my mind
Words by Robert Hunter
Music by Jerry Garcia
“The Ballad of Casey Jones” was briefly part of the band’s repertoire, appearing twice in shows in 1970.
B. A. Botkin, in his A Treasury of American Folklore, wrote:
The facts behind the story of John Luther “Casey” Jones have been well known since at least the early 1920s. The incident to which the original song refers took place on April 30, 1900. His nickname was from the town of Cayce, Kentucky, near his birthplace. He was an engineer on the Illinois Central line, with a trademark way of blowing the train’s whistle, giving rise to the phrase “Casey Moan.”
“You see,” said Mrs. Jones [his widow, in a 1928 interview published in the Erie Railroad Magazine, vol. 24, no. 2 (April 1928), pp. 13–14], “he established a sort of trademark for himself by his inimitable method of blowing a whistle. It was a kind of long-drawn-out note that he created, beginning softly, then rising, then dying away almost to a whisper. People living along the Illinois Central right of way between Jackson and Water Valley would turn over in their beds late at night and say: ‘There goes Casey Jones’ as he roared by.”
And A. J. “Fatty” Thomas, often a conductor on trains driven by Jones, said:
“The ‘whistle’s moan’ in the song is right. Casey could just about play a tune on the whistle. He could make the cold chills run up your back with it, and grin all the time. Everybody along the line knew Casey Jones’s whistle.”
Botkin, quoting the Erie Railroad Magazine, continues:
The common story of the wreck in which Jones was killed is that Casey had to meet two freight trains which were too long to clear the siding. For some reason, never clearly explained, Casey failed to stop and he piled them up when he struck the caboose and cars protruding out on the main line.
Casey, according to the accounts, was very unlikely to have been high on anything, however, being a teetotaler “in the days when abstinence was rare.”
The original song memorializing Casey Jones was written a few days after the accident by Jones’s friend Wallace Saunders, an African American engine wiper.
According to Fuld:
John Luther “Casey” Jones was an engineer on Illinois Central Railroad’s best railroad train, the ‘Cannon Ball Express,’ from Chicago to New Orleans. . . . Jones’s friend Wallace Saunders . . . is said to have adapted or written a ballad regarding the heroic tale, which was sung by Negro railroad men and then allegedly adapted by two white vaudevillians, Eddie Newton and T. Lawrence Seibert.
John Lomax picks up the story in Folk Song U.S.A.:
The Casey Jones ballad familiar to most Americans, sprang from Wallace Saunders’ song by way, curiously, of the vaudeville stage. Tallifero Lawrence Seibert (born June 4, 1877, in Bloomington, Indiana; died February 20, 1917, in Los Angeles) toured the vaudeville circuit in a five-character act. According to Elliot Shapiro (one of the pundits of popular song), Seibert “undoubtedly heard” ‘Been on the Cholly So Long.’ He wrote a sketch about the brave engineer and incorporated it into his act.” Out on the pier in Venice, California, he bumped into a ragtime piano player, Eddie Walter Newton (born September 25, 1869, in Trenton, Missouri; died September 1, 1915, and his ashes were scattered under the pier cafe in Venice). Together they turned out a ragtime ballad about Casey, set him up as the main “hogger” on a Western railroad line, and published the song themselves in the Southern California Music Company. By 1909 the song had swept the country as a popular hit, retaining so many folk song touches that folk singers have since then created scores of variants and parodies based on the Newton-Seibert ballad.
Their version of the song has these words:
Come all you rounders if you want to hear
The story of a brave engineer
Casey Jones was the rounder’s name
On the “six-eight” wheeler, boys, he won his fame
The caller called Casey at half past four
He kissed his wife at the station door
He mounted to the cabin with the orders in his hand
And he took his farewell trip to that promis’d land
Chorus:
Casey Jones—mounted to his cabin
Casey Jones—with his orders in his hand
Casey Jones—mounted to his cabin
And he took his . . . land (last line of each verse)
He looked at his water and his water was low
He looked at his watch and his watch was slow
He turned to his fireman and this is what he said
“Boy, we’re going to reach Frisco, but we’ll all be dead”
He turned to the fireman, said, “Shovel on your coal
Stick your head out the window, see the drivers roll
I’m gonna drive her ’til she leaves the rail
For I’m eight hours late by that Western Mail”
Chorus:
Casey Jones—I’m gonna drive her
Casey Jones—’til she leaves the rail
Casey Jones—I’m gonna drive her
For I’m eight . . .
When he pulled up that Reno hill
He whistled for the crossing with an awful shrill
The switchman knew by the engine’s moan
That the man at the throttle was Casey Jones
When he was within six miles of the place
There No. 4 stared him straight in the face
He turned to his fireman, said “Jim, you’d better jump
For there’re two locomotives that are going to bump.
Chorus:
Casey Jones—two locomotives
Casey Jones—going to bump etc.
Casey said just before he died,
“There’re two more roads I would like to ride”
The fireman said, “Which ones can they be?”
“O the Northern Pacific and the Santa Fe”
Mrs. Jones sat at her bed a sighing
Just to hear the news that her Casey was dying
“Hush up, children, and quite your cryin’
For you’ve got another poppa on the Salt Lake Line”
(Chorus)
Anna Sage, who betrayed John Dillinger to the FBI, was wearing red on the night Dillinger was shot—actually, she was wearing an orange skirt, which appeared red in the lights of the movie theater marquee. She was referred to in contemporary reports as “the Lady in Red.” The song “Lady in Red” was written in 1935 by Mort Dixon and Allie Wrubel.
‘Twas a cold winter’s evening, the guests were all
leaving, O’Leary was closing the bar,
When he turned and he said to the lady in red,
“Get out, you can’t stay where you are.”
She shed a sad tear in her bucket of beer as she thought of the cold night ahead,
Then a gentleman dapper stepped out of the (phone booth) and these are the words that he said:
“Her mother never told her the things a young girl should know.
About the ways of college men, and how they come and go (mostly . . . go).
Now age has taken her beauty, and sin has left its sad scar;
So remember your mothers and sisters, boys, and let her sleep under the bar.
Red and lady also have drug slang connotations: one for downers, the other for cocaine itself, leading to a reinforcement of the antidrug message of this lyric: Uppers lead to downers, and a vicious cycle ensues.
Studio recording: Workingman’s Dead (May 1970).
First performance: June 20, 1969, at the Fillmore East in New York. It remained in the repertoire fairly consistently through 1984, then was dropped until June 1992, when it reappeared for four more performances.
The Mississippi John Hurt version (recorded by him on his Folk Songs and Blues: Gryphon, 1963) is included on the Garcia-Grisman CD Shady Grove.
Garcia, interviewed on the song by Reich and Wenner:
Reich: Does “Casey Jones” grate on you when you hear it sometimes?
Garcia: Sometimes, but that’s what it’s supposed to do. [Laughs]
Reich: It’s such a singsongy thing.
Garcia: Right. And it’s got a split-second little delay, which sounds very mechanical, like a typewriter almost, on the vocal, which is like a little bit jangly, and the whole thing is, well . . . I always thought it’s a pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like. A little bit evil. And hard-edged. And also that singsongy thing, because that’s what it is, a sing-songy thing, a little melody that gets in your head. (Garcia)
And Hunter:
The other one that comes to mind is “Drivin’ that train / High on cocaine / Casey Jones, you better / watch your speed.” I said the bad word—cocaine—and put it in a somewhat romanticized context, and people look at that as being an advertisement for cocaine rather than what a close inspection of the words will tell you. (Jackson: Excerpt from Goin’ Down the Road). 94