Midnight Special: A Song History

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"Midnight Special" is a prison song said to have been inspired by the Central Unit at Sugar Land, Texas, a prison near Houston.[1][2] Bruce Jackson and other scholars have counted it among the songs prisoners passed along by ear.[3] In the song the title train comes from Houston and its light shines into a prisoner's cell.[1] Some accounts add a prison belief that whoever the light fell on would soon be released, but Elijah Wald writes that he knows of no solid evidence for it.[3]

Wood engraving of two railroad men on the platform of a train at night

Winslow Homer, Danger Ahead, from Appleton's Journal, wood engraving, April 30, 1870. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for its night-train subject; it has no connection to the song.

Wald notes that the song seems to have circulated widely in the South, and that it was recorded more than once in the 1920s: in 1926 by Dave "Pistol Pete" Cutrell, a white singer from Oklahoma, and the following year by the Black singer and guitarist Sam Collins.[3] Collins cut his "Midnight Special Blues" for Gennett in Richmond, Indiana, around September 1927.[4] Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, who served time at Sugar Land in the 1920s, made the song famous in the 1930s.[1][2] His "Midnight Special" appears in a Library of Congress collection of Lead Belly recordings made by John A. and Alan Lomax between 1934 and 1942.[5] In June 1940 he recorded for RCA Victor with the Golden Gate Quartet, and Victor issued that material as an album named for the song.[6]

Lead Belly's music caught on with New York's urban folk musicians, and in Britain the skiffle star Lonnie Donegan later recorded "Midnight Special."[2][6] Creedence Clearwater Revival included it on Willy and the Poor Boys, released in November 1969.[7]

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Sources

  1. KUT Radio: "Shuttered Texas Prison Inspired Folk Standard 'Midnight Special'".
  2. 64 Parishes (Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities): "Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter".
  3. Elijah Wald, song blog: "Midnight Special".
  4. Stefan Wirz, American Music discographies: "Illustrated Sam Collins discography".
  5. Library of Congress, American Folklife Center: "Searching the Collections - Lead Belly: Resources in the American Folklife Center".
  6. Smithsonian Folkways: "Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection" (liner notes).
  7. AllMusic: "Willy and the Poor Boys - Creedence Clearwater Revival".