Casey Jones

Dominic Vautier
updated  1/2015
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Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton are credited with writing Casey Jones.  But these two men were probably not the original authors, at least not totally.  Seibert and Newton first heard the song when some railroad workers were humming it.  Railroad crews were accustomed to applying the same music to various railroad catastrophes (and there were lots back then), using this same melody and making up different words to go with each new catastrophe.  In this case it was about the railroad engineer Casey Jones, who was involved in a tragic train wreck several years earlier.

It was on the dark night of Sunday, April 29, 1900, engineer John Luther Jones drove his fast cannonball express out of Memphis.  Simian Taylor Webb was the fireman on board.  The regular engineer was sick and Casey and Sim Webb were the substitutes.  They were already eight hours late so you might say they were highballing it, as the yardbirds say.  When engine number 382 came around a bend with Casey at the throttle, the two found themselves looking at the back of a freight car that was standing still on the track directly in front of them.

Casey told Sim Webb to jump, and moments later, with Jones still at the throttle trying to stop the speeding locomotive, the fast cannonball express slammed into the freight train.  Jones was killed instantly.  Webb lived to tell the tale which he probably told a lot of times and it kept getting better.

Seibert write four verses for the song, using the same melody he had picked up from railroad workers, while Newton arranged words around the melody.  At first they had difficulty getting any publisher to look at the song, but eventually, it became a big seller, and highballing Casey became forever an American legend.