SONGWRITER'S ANATOMY CLASS: "I've Been Working On The Railroad"
Studies in songcraft, or how a simple song grows out of a mash-up
Today’s sample is “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” The contemporary tendency is to file this as a children’s folk song, but it’s actually a mash-up of songs and themes with rather adult complexities about work and women, originating from the 19th-Century.
The melody was adapted from the 1846 “Poet & Peasant Overture” by Franz von Suppè, the Austrian composer of theatre music and light opera whose music was re-popularized in cartoons of the 1930s-50s (dial up Bugs Bunny’s “Baton Bunny”). At 1:15 you can hear the cello play the melody:
The earliest incarnation of this song was published in 1894 as "The Levee Song” with “Railroad” as a subtext. Then in 1923, in the song’s first known recording (as a B-side) by The Shannon Quartet (a.k.a. The Shannon Four), the parts were finally distinguished as two works. The Quartet performed it in a minstrel style with indelicate lyrics about working on the levee and the railroad, along with remarks about a disgraceful woman named Grace.
In the 1920s it was custom for songwriters to take liberty and assign themselves a copyright to anonymous folk songs, and someone named Stephen Fay claimed publishing (which, to my knowledge, has never been enforced).
“Dinah” was 19th Century British slang for a woman of African American descent, and it’s unclear when the Dinah section was stapled on. The part was lifted from “Old Joe, or Somebody in the House with Dinah,” an 1830’s British pub song that echoed E.P. Christy's "Goodnight, Ladies.”
In the 20th Century the song was amended countless times with different lyrics (including Japanese) and to accommodate sporting events and other purposes. In 1963, Pete Seeger championed it (perhaps for all time) as a children’s song on one of his popular children’s albums.
The shuffle-beat chord structure is classic Americana that adapts easily to blues, country, jazz, light classical, and rock’n’roll, even informing Brian Wilson compositions like “California Girls” and “Cabin-Essence.”
Time has scrubbed the song of its coarse elements, and I recorded it in 1988 with my then four-year-old daughter Jade. By the time we got to it, the song felt like good clean fun, running on the train tracks of history.
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