A Singer, a Song, and Memories

By Sandor Slomovits

I first heard Steve Goodman’s song, “The City of New Orleans” over fifty years ago. I remember seeing him sing it at the Mariposa Folk Festival sometime in the mid 1970s, but I heard Arlo Guthrie’s much better-known version even earlier. I thought it was a terrific song, but I felt no special pull to learn it. I continued to come across it occasionally over the years, especially in the mid ‘80s after Willie Nelson’s version came out, and always felt the same about it.

Until this past summer.

I no longer recall how I encountered it again, but this time it spoke to me, and I knew I wanted to sing it. I began exploring what key felt, and sounded right, for my voice then chose the fingering and strumming pattern which worked best on guitar. I remembered an old guitar trick that Josh White used on train songs; by repeating, quick downward slides on the lowest bass string, and damping all the other strings while strumming, he imitated the chugging sound of a train starting and slowly gathering speed. I’m not the guitar wizard that Josh was, but by simplifying his technique, then beginning the song very slowly, and gradually speeding it up, I devised a passable imitation of a train leaving the station and accelerating to cruising speed. I began singing the song over and over, memorizing the words. And discovered that I couldn’t get through it without choking up and crying—every single time.

There have been other songs that have moved me deeply, ones that I had some similar initial difficulty singing. But nothing quite like this.

To be sure, it is a somewhat sad song—an elegy to a bygone era when railways ruled the road. Some of its lyrics are melancholy; “Fifteen cars, and fifteen restless riders…” and, “All the towns and people seem to fade into a bad dream, and the steel rail still ain’t heard the news…” and, “This train’s got the disappearing railroad blues.”

There are hints of Steve’s awareness of our country’s difficult race relations: “freight yards full of old black men…” and “through the Mississippi darkness….”

There’s also the line in the chorus, “I’ll be gone five hundred miles…” which hearkens back to a much sadder song, Hedy West’s “500 Miles.” But I’ve never had a similar problem with that song.

And besides, despite all those mournful references, “The City of New Orleans” doesn’t sound forlorn; it’s up-tempo, fun to play, and has mostly major chords. Goodman even gave a nod to the bawdy doggerel penned by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and Yale law professor Thurman Arnold, when he quoted their first line, “The passengers will please refrain…” near the end of “The City of New Orleans.”

So, why was I weeping? Sure, I was aware that Steve died way too young of leukemia at age 36 leaving behind his wife and three young daughters. He was a magnetic performer and a brilliant songwriter with countless songs still left to write. The only time I saw him live, nearly fifty years ago, improvising hilarious blues lyrics with David Bromberg, remains vivid in my memory. But could that explain my getting emotional, nearly forty years after he died?

Maybe it was the beginning of the chorus, “Good morning, America, how are you?” The answer to that question has been pretty cheerless since 2016. Was that it?

What about the lines, “The sons of Pullman porters, the sons of engineers, ride their fathers’ magic carpet made of steel?” I’ve always been a sucker for father and son songs, perhaps due to my often troubled relationship with my own father. But that’s the only line in the song about that subject, and it wasn’t the only one, or even one that reliably triggered tears.

I kept practicing the song, not daring to bring it out in public. I asked my daughter to play it with me, to add her fiddle and harmony vocals on the chorus. It made things worse. Her fiddle imitation of a train whistle on the intro, before I even started singing, was enough to get me going.

Finally, months after I began working on the song, while attempting it once again with my daughter accompanying me on fiddle, I got a strong hit about what might be going on. Tears streaming down my face, I shared my fresh insight with her. “The first time I ever remember boarding a train was the day our family left our native Hungary in the wake of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.” In the days before we left, our mom had taken my brother and me on tours of her beloved Budapest, telling us repeatedly, “Remember this, we may not ever be back here.” In fact, fifty years went by before we saw Budapest again.

Was it too far-fetched to think that a long-buried grief about leaving behind almost everyone and everything I knew when I was eight years old, prompts my present day blues when I sing this song, now more than sixty-five later? Maybe I’m not feeling my own sadness about leaving Hungary; perhaps I am identifying instead with the losses my parents may have felt. My mother was 39, my father 47 when we left Hungary. Both had lived almost all their lives in their native land. I reflected on the courage it takes to leave behind all your relatives and friends, your home, your career, your language….

I remembered a line in the song’s chorus: “Don’t you know me, I’m your native son?” It’s a surprising sentiment in America, a land settled almost entirely by immigrants. I wondered if those who rail against asylum seekers and immigrants these days have given much thought to what their ancestors gave up in coming here, what some people risk now to escape the suffering they have had to endure elsewhere.

When later I told my brother my insights about the song, he pointed out quietly, “We do have other associations with trains….”

Oh. Right.

In late 1944, four years before my brother and I were born, our mother was forced onto a railroad cattle car in Budapest and taken to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany. A month later, again in a cattle car, she was transferred to Penig, Germany to do slave labor for the Nazis in an airplane parts factory until the end of the war.

Our father carried a visible memento of one of his wartime train encounters. The deformed nail on his big toe was a permanent reminder of having a railroad car door slammed on his foot when he was in the forced labor unit attached to the Hungarian army.

Additionally, our paternal grandparents, along with nearly a dozen members of my father’s immediate family were packed into crowded cattle cars bound for death in Auschwitz. I couldn’t help contrasting the cruel nightmare of their last train ride with the sweet images Steve Goodman sees on his journey, “Mothers with their babes asleep, rockin’ to the gentle beat, and the rhythm of the rails is all they feel.”

I don’t know if these insights are adequate explanations for what happens to me when I sing “The City of New Orleans.” They’re theories that cannot be subjected to rigorous testing using the scientific method. They’re not amenable to double blind studies. Nor do they need to be. They’re just small examples of our human need to create stories that try to help us understand what may be ultimately unknowable.

We’ve long known that there are mysteries inside each of us, hidden from others and even—perhaps especially—ourselves; long forgotten events and encounters that shaped us and that, often beneath our awareness, continue to guide our beliefs and actions and affect our lives in small and large ways. I don’t know if my understandings will help me sing the song in public. We’ll see. One of the reasons for trying to understand ourselves is that it may help us improve how we live our lives. But it’s not the only one.

My experience with “The City of New Orleans” has reaffirmed my faith in the power of great works of art to move us in many different ways. In every medium, including folk song, these works enable us to make discoveries about ourselves, to experience otherwise unavailable, inaccessible emotions, and to find and tell our own stories.

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