Railroad engineer, ballad hero. Jones, a Welsh American reared in Cayce, Kentucky,
signed his name “Cayce Jones” on most documents, to distinguish himself from the
legion of other Welsh American Joneses who also took to railroading as an occupation in
the middle of the 19th century. The name was, however, pronounced “Casey,” and
according to some sources it was newspapermen who changed the spelling to make it
consistent with the pronunciation.
In 1888 Jones entered the employ of the Illinois Central (IC) Railroad, and two years
later he took over as engineer of the most prestigious run of the railroad: the IC’s
Cannonball Express, fast passenger train from Chicago to New Orleans. Jones brought
with him his distinctive six-chime train whisde (in those days engineers could install
whatever type of whistle they wanted), so indeed, as the ballads told,
The switchman knew by the engine’s moans That the man at the throtde
was Casey Jones.
On Sunday, April 29, 1900, Jones and his fireman, Sim Webb, were due to take charge of
the Cannonball in Memphis at a departure time of 11:35 P.M., southbound to Canton,
Mississippi. However, the train was 95 minutes late, and Jones, who always had a
reputation as a “fast roller,” highballed southward, apparently determined to make up lost
time. He was nearly back on schedule when his train approached Vaughan, 175 miles
south of Memphis. There, because of an unusual combination of circumstances, the
caboose of a southbound freight extended past the siding switch and was on the main line
in Jones’ way. Jones was going too fast to stop. His fireman, Webb, yelled a warning, and
Jones told him to jump, while he applied the brakes. Webb did jump, sustaining only
slight injuries, but Jones died as his engine plowed into the caboose of the other train.
In 1909 two vaudevillians, T. Lawrence Seibert and Eddie Newton, published a pop
song, “Casey Jones (The Brave Engineer),” that quickly became a national hit. The
ultimate source of Seibert and Newton’s material remains uncertain, but the evidence
suggests that they had heard some fragmentary songs or ballads that were composed and
sung about Jones by African American railroad workers shortly after the accident. (There
are references to songs about Jones as early as 1908, when a complete ballad was
published in Railroad Man’s Magazine.) Hillbilly and blues recordings in the 1920s, as
well as field collections from the 1910s and 1920s, suggest that such “pre-SeibertNewton” versions circulated fairly widely in the decade following the accident; some of
them were evidently based on still earlier songs about hobos and railroaders.
Norm Cohen
References
Cohen, Norm. 1981. Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.