Annotation:Casey Jones

Tune properties and standard notation

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CASEY JONES. Old-Time, Breakdown. G Major (Edden Hammons) or D Major. Standard tuning (fiddle). AABB. A reel-time setting of a folk song air. In the repertoire of West Virginia fiddler Edden Hammons. The famous railroad song was published in 1909, credited to two railroad men, T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton. Casey Jones was written about a real person, John Luther Jones (1864-1900), nicknamed 'Casey' because of his birthplace, Cayce, Kentucky. Jones, an engineer, substituted for a sick friend the night of April 29, 1900, and took the Cannonball Limited out of Memphis on a Sunday run. The train crashed into another one, and Jones was indeed killed, "with his hand on the throttle, scalded to death by the steam." The Leighton Brothers sang the song for years on the vaudeville stage. A counterclaim for authorship rests with Wallace Sanders, an African-American engine-wiper who worked in the roundhouse at Canton, Mississippi, and who probably knew Casey Jones. John Lomax found an older, although different, song called "Jimmie Jones," which had a variant "'Cause He's Been on the Charlie Too Long." Sigmund Spaeth believes it was the older "Jimmie Jones" song that Sanders knew, and that "he would quite naturally have changed the 'Jimmie' to 'Casey' after the tragedy" [See Sigmund Spaeth, A History of Popular Music in America, 1948, pp. 366-367].

Source for notated version: Art Stamper (Mo.) [Phillips].

Printed sources: Phillips (Traditional American Fiddle Tunes), vol. 1, 1994; p. 44.

Recorded sources: Edden Hammons Collection II, Disc 1.

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Tune properties and standard notation