Here Come My Train

I wanted to send you all some passages from Blues Legacies and Black Feminism by Angela Davis (a text I recommend as required reading) which are key to the travel/train theme:

When slavery was finally abolished, mobility was no longer proscribed by law and the black community was offered the historically new experience of embarking upon personal journeys, journeys whose territorial and economic relocations occasioned and were occasioned by psychological repositionings. "As important as spacial mobility has been throughout American history for all segments of the popultation," Lawrence Levine has observed,

"it was a particularly crucial symbol for Afro-Americans to whom it had been denied throughout the long years of slavery. Freedom of movement, as Howard Thurman has argued, was for Negroes the "most psycologically dramatic of all manifestations of freedom." The need to move, the existence of places to go, and the ability to get there, constituted central motifs in the black song after emancipation."

...men often had no alternative to travelling in search of work. This was the genesis of a historical pattern of male travel within the African-Amberican community. This economic catalyst for male travel also set the stage for the evolution of the country blues, an inprovised musical form forged by southern black men wandering from town to town and from state to state. They moved- on foot or by freight train- carrying their banjos and guitars in search of work, or simply succumbing to the contagious wanderlust that was a by-product of emancipation. "Following emancipation," jazz writer Ben Sidran has observed,

"freedom was equated with mobility, and thousands of Negroes took to the roads (establishing a pattern which was to become part of the black self-image in America). The travelling musician, who had taken on the role of truth-teller from the black Preacher, the role of trickster, or "bad nigger," from the Devil, became the ultimate symbol for freedom. Escape from the monotony and static hopelessness of black employment, combined with the potential for earning a living without having to rely on the white man- beating the white man at his own game, in other words- kept the musician's status high."

Jazz musician and writer Julio Finn emphasizes the psychological meaning of travel within the lives of male blues musicians:

"For the bluesman the road is a living being, a redoubtable character capable of heavenly sweetness and incredible cruelty. He tells it his problems, admonishes it for its caprices, cajoles it to treat him right, and complains to it when things go wrong. It is both a seductress who lures him back away from his loved ones and the fairy godmother who leads him back home."

Like themes of sexualilty, themes of travel in the blues reflected and gave expression to new social realities. However, unlike sexuality, which was so conspicuously absent in the music of slavery, travel could claim a solid place within black musical history. In a sense, it can be said that travel themes in the blues rearticulated the collective desire to escape bondage that pervaded the musical culture of slavery. Travel was one of the central organizing themes of the spirituals. Travelling liberators (as in "Go down Moses/ Way down in Egypt land/ Tell old Pharoah/ To let my people go") and signposts for travel (as in "Follow the drinking gourd/ And the old man is a-waiting/ For to carry you to freedom/ Follow the drinking gourd") are common subjects of the spirituals. Images of trains (as in "The gospel train is coming/ Get on board, little children, get on board") and other traveling vehicles (as in "Swing low, sweet chariot/ Coming for to carry me home") are also abundant in the spirituals. In his discussion of the agencies and models in transformation in the spirituals, black music scholar John Lovell, Jr., observes:

"Songs about trains are a minor miracle. The railroad train did not come into America until the late 1820s;it did not reach the slave country to any great extent until the 1830s and 1840s. Even then, the opportunities of the slave to examine trains closely were limited. Yet, before 1860, many spiritual poems exploited the train, its seductive sounds, speed and power, its recurring schedules, its ability to carry large numbers of passengers at cheap rates, its implicit democracy."

... Commenting on the blues, cultural critic Houstobn Baker has written:

"Even as they speak of paralyzing absence and ineradicable desire, their instrumental rhythms suggest change, movement, action, continuance, unlimited and unending possibility. Like signification itself, blues are always nomadically wandering. Like the freight-hopping hobo, they are ever on the move, ceaselessly summing novel experience.

... Ma Rainey herself was aware of the extent to which her music permitted her audience- especially the women who came out to see her- to partake vicariously of the experience of travel. During one phase of her career, she identified her favorite song as "Traveling Blues":

Train's at the station, I heard the whistle blow
The train's at the station, I heard the whistle blow
I done bought my ticket and I don't know where I'll go

I went to the depot, looked up and down the board
I went to the depot, looked up and down the board
I asked the ticket agent, "Is my town on this road?"

The ticket agent said, "Woman, don't sit and cry."
The ticket agent said, "Woman, don't sit and cry
The train blows and this station, but she keeps on passing by."

I hear my daddy calling some other woman's name
I hear my daddy calling some other woman's name
I know he don't need me, but I'm gonna answer just the same

I'm dangerous and blue, can't stay here no more
I'm dangerous and blue, can't stay here no more
Here come my train, folks, and I've got to go.

When Ma Rainey sang this song, she dramatized the activity of travel, consciously attempting to evoke feeling among members of her audience:

"Baby, I came out on that stage, dressed down! I had on a hat and a coat and was carrying a suitcase. I put the suitcase down, real easy like, then stand there like I was thinking- just to let them see what I was about. Then I sing. You could just see them jigs wanting to go some place else."

For women especially, the ability to travel implied a measure of autonomy, an ability to shun passivity and acquiescence in the face of mistreatment and injustice and to exercise some control over the circumstances of their lives, especially over their sexual lives. The railroad tracks were concrete evidence of something different, perhaps better, somewhere elso. The protagonist of "Travelling Blues" does not know, in fact, where she is headed. Yet she has purchased her ticket and is certain of the fact that she has got to go wherever her travels may lead her. This song provides a powerful refutation of the blues cliche that "when a man gets the blues, he hops a train and rides, [but] when a woman gets the blues, she lays down and cries."