New River Train

The New River runs north out of the Blue Ridge through southwest Virginia, and the song is usually tied to a real train on it, the Norfolk and Western line that served the mill town of Fries, on the river. Henry Whitter, a guitar player born near Fries who worked in the cotton mill there, made the first record of it for OKeh in 1924. Fields Ward later said his family in the same part of Virginia had been singing it since about 1895.

Kelly Harrell recorded it in New York in 1925, Vernon Dalhart and Ernest Stoneman recorded it too, and in 1936 the Monroe Brothers made the version bluegrass remembers, Bill Monroe on mandolin and Charlie on guitar, fast, in D. From there it went into every jam. The words count upward, one verse at a time, and the chorus is about the train. It is on most beginner jam lists because anyone can learn the words in one pass.

The verses, the chorus and the breaks all go around the same sixteen bars of chords. The Idaho Bluegrass Association's beginner jam writes the chords as 1111 1155 1144 5511, and notes that some bands go back to the G for a bar before the D near the end, 1511 instead of 5511. This page carries the first way, and the band on the Jam plays it the same.

On a mandolin in G the melody sits on the A course, with the open E course for its highest note and the fifth fret of the D course for its lowest, and the break reaches down once to the open D. The singer holds long notes and breathes between lines, and a break fills those places: a walk up out of each held G, a lick of four quarter notes in the empty bar, and a climb into the C chord. The D chord bars at the end of each half are the ones to get clean. Play it slowly at first. The Monroe Brothers took it at a gallop, and most jams follow them.