Train Songs and Greek Syntax

Douglas Wilson has said that pastors might be better served by closing their books on Greek syntax and trying to figure out why Johnny Cash wrote train songs. At some point in my theological education, I realized that my struggles with English syntax precluded my ever mastering Greek syntax. Besides, my main problem has always been obeying the clear passages, rather than exegeting the unclear. So I found myself in much accord with this Douglas Wilson statement.

I have another reason for favoring this approach to theology: I like Johnny Cash and I like train songs. Although, he was not the perfect model to follow, I am glad that in my childhood days that I listened to “Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison” rather than some group of long-haired hippies playing on electric guitars. I lost track of Johnny Cash’s music through the years, but picked up the last record he released—“The Man Comes Around.” Certainly the late Johnny Cash reached a wide audience with his range of songs. Whether he was singing about love, sin, God, or even trains, something of his heart went out in every song.

So why did Johnny Cash write and sing train songs? In short, because train songs are part of the country music tradition. That only broadens rather than answers the question. Why were train songs a part of the country music tradition?

First, a few words about country music. Unbelievably, in the 1940s, a governor of Tennessee allowed that country music was an embarrassment to the state. It pert near cost him his job. Country singer Roy Acuff, later proclaimed the king of country music, ran against him, but lost only because he ran as a Republican in a Yellow Dog Democrat state during the heyday of the Roosevelt Democratic coalition.

Country music is a wide-ranging category of music in the modern world. There are battles between the purist traditions and the popularizers. These battles, like any conflict arising among predominantly Southerner groups, is quite bitter and nasty. Without trying to stray away too far, purists would include George I and George II, that is Jones and Strait. Purists would include the Bluegrass musicians from the late Bill Monroe to Ralph Stanley (and the Stanley Brothers)—both of whom were in the ‘founding stage’ of bluegrass music to Ricky Skaggs and Allison Krauss. Popularizers would include those like Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks; popularizers are those who are willing to use non-country instruments and styles, non-country methods, and non-country promotional gimmicks. CMT, the country music video network, caters largely to the popularizer crowds; the Saturday night Grand Ole Opry or your local bluegrass festival caters to the purists.

The older country music, or traditional or purist country music, struck chords with human experience. Country music is memory oriented; it is community and family oriented; it assumes a pilgrimage often from sin to salvation, with the sequence being repeated often this side of heaven; country music indicates a better past—when a more godly culture prevailed—and a better future—when either a more godly culture prevails or at least the circle will be unbroken in heaven. Country music presupposes Christianity, faithful mothers, true love, heaven, and the goodness of America. Country music recognizes the existence of sin, drinking, marital unfaithfulness, killings (often resulting from the last two mentioned items), and wicked people.

It affirms the Saturday night grand ole time at the local honky tonk and the Sunday morning worship service. Both happen. Both represent human needs and failures. Both are part of the real human condition and predicament.

Granted that out of the large corpus of country songs, many are theologically atrocious, morally stupid, hopelessly sentimental, lyrically irritating, emotionally nauseating, amorously idolatrous, and sapid, banal, and ignorant. Yet the corpus contains many great works of lower cultural poetry: Songs, or lyrics or poems, that tell the essence of love and loneliness, the pleasures and pain of wine, women, and songs, the ties to home and family, and a depth of religious experience rivaling the poetry of John Donne.

[At the risk of losing all credibility, I will maintain that had John Donne been born in Alabama or Arkansas in the 20th century, given his propensity to write really sensual love poetry and really deep religious poetry, that he would have been right up there with Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. Although this is true, don't try to sing Donne's sonnet "Batter My Heart Three Person God" to the tune of "Daddy Sang Bass."]

All of which brings us back to train songs. We live in an age that is now either bored or unimpressed with machinery, mechanization, computerization, with things digitalized, mass produced, plastic, or glitzy. We live in an age of franchises, making every city look alike, an age of malls and chain stores, and via Internet, every item you ever wanted it available with a few clicks.

But Johnny Cash was born in a world closer to the earth, a farm in Arkansas; he was born in a time closer to a world where mechanization was fascinating attractive, but optional; a world where the city was tempting, but not fulfilling; a world where the train was both metaphor and reality. The train brought relief and pleasure and ‘the world’ to life on the farm. But the train was also a threat to the peacefulness and assuredness of home and hearth.

The greater world was way off yonder—in the cities, cities an uncle or cousin had perhaps visited, cities that a few had wandered off to and never returned. This greater world was a draw: It was filled with wonder and with real wonders. Most important, thanks to trains, the city was something you go to and it was something you could return from. Home was a constant, home with the girl next door, the hills and creeks, the little country church. However fast the train might go leaving the valley or returning to the valley, life in the valley stayed the same, or so it seemed, or so we still continue to wish. (I have recurring dreams of such a place and have not found it.)

Trains in the older rural South were like quests for knights of old. A train might take you toward love, adventure, and wealth. It might take you away from sorrow, danger, and poverty. The goal might be where the quest takes you, or it might be the journey itself. Some knights were drawn on quests for noble ideas; others for less noble goals. Likewise, the train could carry one toward greater things or away from the things that matter most.

Trains, like the future, could not be confined to any simple category or definite experience. In the Stanley Brothers’ song “Midnight Train,” the train was a means of escaping lost love and depression: “I’m ridin’ on that midnight train; my head’s hangin’ low; these awful blues will follow me, wherever I may go.” But in Roy Acuff’s “Sunshine Special” the train reunited lovers: “I’ll meet her at the station this morning at nine, Sunshine Special will be right on time.” In the recent big hit “The Long Black Train,” Josh Turner sees the train as an extended metaphor for sin and temptation, but in the old country gospel song “Life is like a Mountain Railroad,” the train and railway was a Pilgrim’s Progress through the ups and downs of life, successful from ‘the cradle to the grave” only for those who were guided by the Savior. Sometimes the songs, like Acuff’s hit ‘The Wabash Cannonball’ celebrated the power and beauty of the trains: “She’s mighty tall and handsome and known quite well by all; She’s a combination on the Wabash Cannonball.” Sometimes the songs, like ‘Wreck of Old 97’, lamented the romantic danger facing those glamorous engineers of the modern world of trains.

The Great Depression, which began earlier and lasted longer for the South, highlighted another aspect of trains. Hopping a freight was a means of escaping the poverty and hopelessness of many a Southerners situation. Often, the promise of success off somewhere else led to even greater despair. Hence the singer in the song “Detroit City” decides that he will put away his foolish pride and hop on a train and ride back home. So once again, the train that took you away from home was a means of getting home.

The beginnings of recorded country music largely grew out of the songs of Mississippian Jimmie Rogers, known as ‘the Singing Brakeman.’ Rogers helped develop the white Southern country side of the music called the Blues. He sings of being ‘a thousand miles away from home, just a waitin’ for a train.’

That same sense of longing and emptiness comes out in Johnny Cash’s famous prison song “Folsom Prison Blues.” It is the sound of the train ‘rolling around the bend’ that causes the singer to lament his being stuck in Folsom Prison while rich folks are drinking coffee and smoking big cigars and enjoying their freedom. Quite different is the celebration of returning to the South in Cash’s early hit “Hey Porter,” in which he instructs the porter to have everybody stand up and yell when the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line.

Trains represented the potential, the hope, the anticipation, the excitement of something that might change life as it is. People seek such; man longs for something beyond his 9 to 5 job. C.S. Lewis wrote the classic account of this search for something, specifically for joy, this longing for something.

People have attempted fulfillment in drugs (which was a particular demon for Cash), alcohol, fame (which Cash experienced), wealth (yes, his name was fittingly Cash), and other things as minor as diets and self-help books.

For Johnny Cash and so many others, the fulfillment was not in the train that was leaving, but the train that was going back. In his wonderful marriage to June Carter, in his baritone faith in Christ (see note), in his love of his calling, in his security in his roots, and in his songs about trains, Johnny Cash must have succeeded in the trip home.

[Baritone Faith: Defined as faith in Christ as exhibited by the voice and timbre of Johnny Cash’s singing; that is, faith that is manly, rugged, struggling, filled with pain as well as joy, and sure of priorities, God, wife, family, calling, and country.]

While I am thankful that God sets apart some men, according to His grace and their intellectual gifts, to seek out Greek syntax, I feel particularly blessed that God called one person to be Johnny Cash.