We at the Wabash Institute of Train Song Studies were saddened to hear of the passing of Leon Redbone.

 

 The Railway Train. 

I like to see it lap the miles, 

And lick the valleys up, 

And stop to feed itself at tanks; 

And then, prodigious, step 

Around a pile of mountains, 

And, supercilious, peer 

In shanties by the sides of roads; 

And then a quarry pare 

To fit its sides, and crawl between, 

Complaining all the while 

In horrid, hooting stanza; 

Then chase itself down hill 

And neigh like Boanerges; 

Then, punctual as a star, 

Stop—docile and omnipotent—

At its own stable door.

Emily Dickinson

We at the Wabash Institute of Train Song Studies were saddened to hear of the passing of Leon Redbone. The version of Polly Wolly Doodle by Mr. Redbone linked to below was included in our official list of train songs we compiled in recognition of October being National Train Song Month several years ago, when we were still a functioning entity. We consider the train reference contained therein to be one of the more distinctively and amusingly odd lyrics in the entire American Train Song repertoire; reminding our former intern, who some have accused of precipitating the collapse of the Institute by going back to college, of The Big Rock Candy Mountain in it’s surrealism, and Blaise Cendrars relating in an autobiographical story how as a young child he trained snails with toothpicks for a circus in miniature.

JB. 

Polly Wolly Doodle, Leon Redbone 

https://youtu.be/7qPz1mqU4fE

Towards Los Angeles, 1937 (WPA sponsored photo)