| "Midnight Special" | |
|---|---|
| Song | |
| Published | 1923 |
| Genre | Country blues |
| Songwriter(s) | Traditional |
"Midnight Special" is a traditional folk song thought to have originated among prisoners in the American South. [1] The song refers to the passenger train Midnight Special and its "ever-loving light."
The song is historically performed in the country-blues style from the viewpoint of the prisoner and has been performed by many artists.
Lyrics appearing in the song were first recorded in print by Howard Odum in 1905: [2]
Get up in the mornin' when ding dong rings,
Look at table — see the same damn thing
However, these lyrics are known to be floater lines, appearing in various African-American songs of that period, notably in the "Grade-Songs", which are about prison captains and have nothing to do with a train or a light. [3]
The first printed reference to the song itself was in a 1923 issue of Adventure magazine, a three-times-a-month pulp magazine published by the Ridgway Company. [4] In 1927 Carl Sandburg published two different versions of "Midnight Special" in his The American Songbag, the first published versions. [5]
The song was first commercially recorded on the OKeh label in 1926 as "Pistol Pete's Midnight Special" by Dave "Pistol Pete" Cutrell (a member of McGinty's Oklahoma Cow Boy Band). [6] Cutrell follows the traditional song except for semi-comedic stanzas about McGinty and Gray and "a cowboy band": [7]
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In March 1929, the band, now Otto Gray and the Oklahoma Cowboys, recorded the song again, this time with the traditional title using only the traditional lyrics. [8]
Sam Collins recorded the song commercially in 1927 under the title "The Midnight Special Blues" for Gennett Records. [9] His version also follows the traditional style. His is the first to name the woman in the story, Little Nora, and he refers to the Midnight Special's "ever-living" light:
Yonder come a Little Nora. How in the world do you know?
I know by the apron and the dress she wears [10]
In 1934, Huddie William "Lead Belly" Ledbetter recorded a version of the song at Angola Prison for John and Alan Lomax, who mistakenly attributed it to him as the author. However, Ledbetter, for his Angola session, appears to have inserted several stanzas relating to a 1923 Houston jailbreak into the traditional song. [11] Ledbetter recorded at least three versions of the song, one with the Golden Gate Quartet, a gospel group (recorded for RCA at Victor Studio #2, New York City, June 15, 1940).
John and Alan Lomax, in their book, Best Loved American Folk Songs, told a credible story identifying the Midnight Special as a train from Houston shining its light into a cell in the Sugar Land Prison. They also describe Ledbetter's version as "the Negro jailbird's ballad to match Hard Times Poor Boy. Like so many American folk songs, its hero is not a man but a train." The light of the train is seen as the light of salvation, the train which could take them away from the prison walls. It is highly reminiscent of the imagery of such gospel songs as "Let the Light from Your Lighthouse Shine on Me". Carl Sandburg had a different view. He believed the subject of the song would rather be run over by a train than spend more time in jail. [12]
Although later versions place the locale of the song near Houston, early versions such as "Walk Right In Belmont" (Wilmer Watts; Frank Wilson, 1927) and "North Carolina Blues" (Roy Martin, 1930) — both essentially the same song as "Midnight Special" — place it in North Carolina. [13] Most of the early versions, however, have no particular location. Only one recording, collected by the Lomaxes at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, actually identifies the railroad operating the Midnight Special — the Illinois Central which had a route through Mississippi. [13]
| "Midnight Special" | |
|---|---|
| Song by Creedence Clearwater Revival | |
| from the album Willy and the Poor Boys | |
| Released | November 2, 1969 |
| Recorded | 1969, Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, California |
| Genre | Folk blues [14] |
| Length | 4:13 |
| Label | Fantasy |
| Songwriter(s) | Traditional |
| Producer(s) | John Fogerty |
Country musicians Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper had a top 5 country hit with their reworking of the song in 1959 as "Big Midnight Special".
Only two versions of the song have reached the US Billboard Hot 100. Paul Evans recorded the highest-charting version of "Midnight Special," reaching number 16 in the winter of 1960. Five years later, Johnny Rivers' version reached number 20 in 1965. The Johnny Rivers version was used as the theme for the NBC music program The Midnight Special .
The song has been recorded by Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Odetta, Les Paul, The Kingston Trio (who also recorded their song "The Tijuana Jail", which retains the same music but with new lyrics), [15] Pete Seeger, Peter, Paul and Mary, Burl Ives, Big Joe Turner, Bobby Darin, Cisco Houston, Jimmy Smith, Mungo Jerry, Van Morrison, Little Richard, Buckwheat Zydeco, Otis Rush, The Spencer Davis Group, Lonnie Donegan, Eric Clapton, The Louvin Brothers, Long John Baldry, The Kentucky Headhunters, Willie Watson, Mischief Brew, Hoyt Axton, Odetta, Billy Bragg, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, among others. Jody Miller arranged her own version and included it on her first album Wednesday's Child is Full of Woe in 1963.
Harry Belafonte's 1962 version is notable for containing the first official recording of Bob Dylan, who played harmonica. [16]
Harry Dean Stanton performs the song in the 1967 movie Cool Hand Luke . [17]
Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s 1969 version was used in the opening sequence of Twilight Zone: The Movie , in a scene featuring Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd enthusiastically singing along.
ABBA recorded the song in 1975 for charity, as a part of a folk medley, along with "Pick a Bale of Cotton" and "On Top of Old Smokey". It was the B-side to their 1978 single "Summer Night City". The medley represents the group's only recording of material not written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus after their breakthrough with "Ring Ring" in 1973. [18]
Dylan references a line from the song — "Shine your light on me" — on the second track, "Precious Angel", of his 1979 gospel album Slow Train Coming . [19]
The Dutch band Drukwerk also recorded a cover of "Midnight Special" for their 1982 album Tweede Druk, mixing English and Dutch vocals.
Paul McCartney has performed it numerous times. It was the closing song on his 1988 album Снова в СССР and was performed on his 1991 appearance on MTV Unplugged , but was not included on the accompanying album.
Mischief Brew recorded a cover of "The Midnight Special" for their 2006 album, Songs From Under the Sink.
NEEDTOBREATHE used the song line "Let the midnight special shine a light on me" as a segue into their original song "Mercy's Shore" on their 2022 album Live From Bridgestone Arena.
Huddie William Ledbetter, better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folk and blues singer notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of "In the Pines", "Goodnight, Irene", "Midnight Special", "Cotton Fields", and "Boll Weevil".
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker. Lomax produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries, and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. He collected material first with his father, folklorist and collector John Lomax, and later alone and with others, Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song, of which he was the director, at the Library of Congress on aluminum and acetate discs.
The term American folk music encompasses numerous music genres, variously known as traditional music, traditional folk music, contemporary folk music, vernacular music, or roots music. Many traditional songs have been sung within the same family or folk group for generations, and sometimes trace back to such origins as the British Isles, Mainland Europe, or Africa. Musician Mike Seeger once famously commented that the definition of American folk music is "...all the music that fits between the cracks."
John Avery Lomax was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lomax Hawes, also distinguished collectors of folk music.
A work song is a piece of music closely connected to a form of work, either one sung while conducting a task or one linked to a task that may be a connected narrative, description, or protest song. An example is "I've Been Working on the Railroad".
"Goodnight, Irene" or "Irene, Goodnight," is a 20th-century American folk standard, written in 3
4 time, first recorded by American blues musician Huddie 'Lead Belly' Ledbetter in 1933. A version recorded by the Weavers was a #1 hit in 1950.
Western music is a form of music composed by and about the people who settled and worked throughout the Western United States and Western Canada. Western music celebrates the lifestyle of the cowboy on the open range, along the Rocky Mountains, and among the prairies of Western North America. The genre grew from the mix of cultural influences in the American frontier and what became the Southwestern United States at the time, it came from the folk music traditions of those living the region, those being the hillbilly music from those that arrived from the Eastern U.S., the corrido and ranchera from Northern Mexico, and the New Mexico and Tejano endemic to the Southwest. The music industry of the mid-20th century grouped the western genre with that of similar folk origins, instrumentation and rural themes, to create the banner of country and western music, which was simplified in time to country music.
"Rock Island Line" is an American folk song. Ostensibly about the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, it appeared as a folk song as early as 1929. The first recorded performance of "Rock Island Line" was by inmates of the Arkansas Cummins State Farm prison in 1934.
"Ain't No More Cane on This Brazos" is a traditional prison work song of the Southern United States. The title refers to work assigned to prisoners sentenced to hard labor in Texas. The labor involved cutting sugar cane along the banks of the Brazos River, where many of the state's prison farms were located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
"Take This Hammer" is a prison, logging, and railroad work song, which has the same Roud number as another song, "Nine Pound Hammer", with which it shares verses. "Swannanoa Tunnel" and "Asheville Junction" are similar. Together, this group of songs are referred to as "hammer songs" or "roll songs". Numerous bluegrass bands and singers like Scott McGill and Mississippi John Hurt also recorded commercial versions of this song, nearly all of them containing verses about the legendary railroad worker, John Henry; and even when they do not, writes folklorist Kip Lornell, "one feels his strong and valorous presence in the song".
"On the Trail of the Buffalo", also known as "The Buffalo Skinners" or "The Hills of Mexico", is a traditional American folk song in the western music genre. It tells the story of an 1873 buffalo hunt on the southern plains. According to Fannie Eckstorm, 1873 is correct, as the year that professional buffalo hunters from Dodge City first entered the northern part of the Texas panhandle. It is thought to be based on the song Canaday-I-O.
Otto Gray and his Oklahoma Cowboys were the first nationally famous cowboy western music band in the United States, and the first cowboy band to appear on the cover of Billboard.
"I'm Alabama Bound" is a ragtime melody composed by Robert Hoffman in 1909. Hoffman dedicated it to an M. T. Scarlata. The cover of its first edition, published by Robert Ebberman, New Orleans, 1909, advertises the music as "Also Known As The Alabama Blues" which has led some to suspect it of being one of the first blues songs. However, as written, it is an up-tempo rag with no associated lyrics. The song has been recorded numerous times in different styles—both written and in sound recordings—with a number of different sets of lyrics.
Looking for a Home is an album by American folk singer Odetta, released in 2001. It consists of songs written and/or performed by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. It was her 18th and final studio album.
Absolutely the Best is a compilation album by American folk singer Odetta, originally released in 2000.
Best of the M.C. Records Years 1999–2005 is a compilation album by American folk singer Odetta, released in 2006. It contains songs she recorded on the M.C. Records label.
"Boll Weevil" is a traditional blues song, also known by similar titles such as "Boweavil" or "Boll Weevil Blues". Many songs about the boll weevil were recorded by blues musicians during the 1920s through the 1940s. However, a rendition by Lead Belly recorded in 1934 by folklorist Alan Lomax led to its becoming well-known. A 1961 adaptation by Brook Benton became a pop hit, reaching number two on the Billboard Hot 100. Fats Domino's "Bo Weevil" is a different song.
"This Train", also known as "This Train Is Bound for Glory", is a traditional American gospel song first recorded in 1922. Although its origins are unknown, the song was relatively popular during the 1920s as a religious tune, and it became a gospel hit in the late 1930s for singer-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe. After switching from acoustic to electric guitar, Tharpe released a more secular version of the song in the early 1950s.
James "Iron Head" Baker and Moses "Clear Rock" Platt were African American traditional folk singers imprisoned in the Central State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas. The men made a number of field recordings of convict work songs, field hollers and other material with John Lomax for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Music in the 1930s.
Shine a Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad is a 2016 album of field recordings made by British singer Billy Bragg and American musician Joe Henry as they performed in waiting rooms and trackside at railway stations on a journey between Chicago and Los Angeles in March 2016. The project was conceived after Henry produced Bragg's thirteenth studio album Tooth & Nail at his home studio in South Pasadena. It was released on the Cooking Vinyl label on 23 September 2016. The project is named after a lyric in the traditional folk song "Midnight Special".
