Reuben's Train: A Song History
"Reuben's Train," also called "Reuben" or "Old Reuben," is an old-time banjo song whose history is tangled up with other Southern railroad songs. The Traditional Tune Archive suggests it may have grown out of, or at least be kin to, the folksong "900 Miles," and notes that its words are a loose string of railroad verses, some of them floating couplets shared with other songs.[1] The Traditional Ballad Index keeps "Reuben's Train" and "Nine Hundred Miles" as separate entries, but cautions that certain versions combine the two so thoroughly that no one can say which song they belong to; it also cites a section of Cohen's Long Steel Rail given over mostly to showing how the pair intermingle.[2] For the "Nine Hundred Miles" entry, the Index's earliest date is 1909, from the Journal of American Folklore.[2]
Currier & Ives, American Railroad Scene: Lightning Express Trains Leaving the Junction, color lithograph, 1874. Library of Congress. No known restrictions on publication. Steam trains of the period; the print is not connected to the song.
According to the Tune Archive, the song was recorded many times, under various titles, during the 78 rpm era, and versions were collected in the upland South from Wade Ward of Independence, Virginia, Frank Proffitt of Reese, North Carolina (in 1961), Bascom Lamar Lunsford and others.[1] The Archive describes "Train Forty-Five," recorded by Grayson & Whitter in 1927 and issued by Victor in 1928, as a close adaptation of "Reuben's Train."[1] The Ballad Index names that same Grayson & Whitter record as an example of a version that cannot be cleanly assigned to either "Reuben's Train" or "Nine Hundred Miles."[2] On the "Nine Hundred Miles" side, the Index lists Fiddlin' John Carson's "I'm Nine Hundred Miles from Home," issued on OKeh in 1924.[2]
Banjo players have kept these tunes in circulation. Smithsonian Folkways' American Banjo: Three-Finger and Scruggs Style, a 1990 expanded reissue of a 1957 LP, includes a "Train 45" by Smiley Hobbs and a "Ruben's Train" by Kenny Miller.[3] For mountain dulcimer players, "Reuben's Train" appears among the 75 jam tunes in the DAD edition of Stephen Seifert's Join the Jam.[4]
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