Wabash Cannonball

The paper trail starts with a railroad advertisement in song form. Sheet music called "The Great Rock Island Route", credited to J. A. Roff, came out in 1882, and a rewritten version by William Kindt appeared as "Wabash Cannon Ball" in 1904. Kindt's is the version the song descends from, and both prints are long out of copyright. There was no such train when the song was written: the Wabash Cannon Ball of the lyric is a made up express, and the Wabash Railroad only put the name on a real train, running Detroit to St. Louis, in 1949, because the song had made it famous. That train ran until 1971.

The Carter Family recorded it in 1929, though the record was not released until 1932, and A. P. Carter registered the song under his own name, which he did with a good deal of older material. That is why people still credit it to the Carters. Roy Acuff and His Crazy Tennesseans cut it in Chicago in October 1936, with Dynamite Hatcher singing and Acuff doing the train whistle, and that record made the song a country standard and Acuff a star. It is one of fewer than forty singles that have sold ten million copies. It went into the National Recording Registry in 2005. None of those records is a source for this page. They are performances of a melody that was already fifty years old.

The song is sixteen bars long and the chorus is sung to the same sixteen bars as the verse, which is why a room can join in on the second time through without being taught anything. Three chords, and each of the four sung lines takes four bars: three of G, then the C, then three bars leaning on D and home. The two halves are nearly identical, and the difference is at the end, where the first half hands on and the second lands.

On a mandolin it sits in one hand position from end to end. The lowest note is the C at the fifth fret of the G course, held for three beats under the C chord, and the highest is the d on the A course, so the whole song lives in the middle of the instrument where it is easy to sing over. Most bars park on a long note, so the tremolo gets a workout: hold the long note while the band moves, then pick the two eighths at the end of the bar cleanly, because those are the words that carry into the next line. The two note pickup is what trips people at speed. Start on "from the", a beat ahead of the bar line, and the rest of the line falls into place.