Engine 143 Sheet Music Lyrics And Chords / Mandolin Tab
The "KFV™ stood, people said, for Fast Flying Vestibule. George Alley was killed October 23. 1890 on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad when his train wrecked due to a landslide. Sara Carter's vocal solo was picked up by Joan Baez who popularized it among large city audiences in 1960-1961. The more fortunate ones learned Engine 143 directly from the Anthology. The original recording was issued by I Victor in 1927. RCA Victor later reissued Engine. 143 [ on its excellent Vintage series, The Railroad in Folksong (Victor LPV 532)
Engine 143 Sheet Music with chords
Harry Smith's Anthology
It's a long story. I storied making records in L939. The company then was known as Asch Records. During the war, shellac was confined to manufacturers who were in business before 1939 so I combined with Stinson who had the production but needed the titles. In 1945, Stinson and I parted.
Came the end of the war, there was a boom here. At that time we paid $10,000 to an artist, and Disc had the top jazz artists. We issued Jazz at the. Philharmonic in close cooperation with Norman Grantz who lent me the money to do it. Grant* later retired a millionaire when he used the money from his Verve Records to buy Picassos by the square inch.
But by 1947, I went bankrupt for $.300,000 and started Folkways Records. People who were involved in folk music between 1939 and 1947 knew what I was doing. I was the only one during those years who was documenting and issuing anything of consequence. In those days there was a union strike and nobody wanted to hire musicians so they came to me. The GPs were coming back from the war bringing songs. Pete Seeger came back then with anti war and antiarmy songs that talked about the Lieutenant who was selling shoes to the private; songs also about the housing, the prices and all that business.
So when I started issuing records again in 1947, this man, the closest I guess to Woody Guthrie as a character, came to see me. He had heard about me. His name was Harry Smith.
Actually his interest was originally in the American Indians of the Northwest. That's how he became interested in music as such, and he documented very early. During the war, because he was so small, he was able to mount the guns in the fusilages of airplanes. He got extra pay and with all that money bought up records. That was also the same time when I bought my collection of '78s — a very large one.
Before the war, the record companies themselves decided what records would be allocated to dealers. The dealer, in order to have a Columbia franchise, for example, would have to take whatever Columbia sent him. Those were
the monopolistic days. Naturally, the hillbilly stuff, the country music and all of that they had to accept here (in N.Y.)— two of each or three
of each.
Then we had the shellac shortage during the war— Asia was cut off and they were using boat* for other things than shellac. So, in order to get shellac, the big companies offered eighteen or twenty cents for all the records dealers had in stock. New York Band and Instrument and all the other dealers I used to pick up records from had tables full of this stuff— the greatest music in the world that New Yorkers knew nothing about. Right?
Harry Smith had the same thing on the West Coast. He bought up thousands of records. He knew what he was doing because all this time he kept track of when the records were recorded and who recorded them. In those days, they issued catalogs that gave the date, the matrix number and the place of the session. In the early Victor and Columbia days, the dealer had all this information.
Harry Smith collected vast information. In addition to that, he is an intellect. He understood the content of the records. He knew their relationship to folk music, their relationship to English literature and their relationship to the world.
He came to me with this vast collection of records. He needed money desperately. All his life he needed money. lie got it from the Guggenheims or he got it from me or from others. He always needed money because he was always experimenting in the movies. He is quite a wellknown movie creator. That's an expensive th to work with.
Out of his collection, he came to me and said: "I»ok, this is what I want to do. I want to lay out the hook of notes. I want to do the whole thing. All I want to be sure of is that they are issued;' Of course I was tremendously interested.
the people on the record.
The sad part of it is that afterwards when I wanted to issue Volumes IV and V we ran into the problem of everybody wanting to get into the act and nobody issuing a thing. The last effort, was John Cohen and Sam Charters but both nf them dropped the project. It was not pressure from other companies. Those people have never influenced me one way or the other. The real reason is I couldn't get the documentation.
The records were not available anymore. Harry had sold them to the New York Public Library— half of them. The other half I bought and Sam Charters went through them and we issued some of the things from the collection — Cajun and others on the RBF label.
No one knew the background of each record. Harry Smith disappeared. Then he started working on finger string games. Then he started working with the Seminole people, and now he is doing very well with moving pictures, so he dropped the whole project. Nobody picked it up at all. This is the horror.
It all is on tape. The problem is that Harry needed the records which were sent to the New York Public Library. The Library just taped it with no documentation at all and nobody has been able to reconstruct it. I have the tapes of Volumes IV and V but I can't get the documentation. There is no sense in just issuing it without the documentation.
The most important thing is the influence of the Anthology on people. It has been a take-off point for many of the younger musicians like Dave Bromberg, people like that. For the documented, the Anthology has set a standard. It's rather interesting that when the White House wanted to get a record collection, the first record they ordered was the Anthology.
Pete Seeger just went to Asia. He took a plane and even with all that weight he took the Anthology. Harold Leventhal went to India and took the Anthology with him. When people are interested in American folk music, it is one of the best examples.
Wherever I go, the first thing they ask me is: "Is it still in print? Is the Anthology of American Folk Music still in print?
In addition to the five songs in this collection from the projected fourth volume of the Anthology, there were twenty-three others planned by Harry Smith. They appear to have been issued mostly from the middle 30's through the war years and include artists like Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, The Arthur Smith Trio, Bradley Kincaid, J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers and Blind Alfred Reed.
In his interview with Harry Smith, John Cohen asks about the never issued Volume IV:
JC: You once told me of your many new plans for Vol IV. of the Anthology.
HS: The real reason that it didn't come out was that I didn't have sufficient interest in it. I wanted to make more of a content analysis. I made phonetic transcriptions of all the words in the songs, but those notebooks got lost. The content analysis was like how many times the word "railroad" was used during the Depression and how many times during the war. The proportions of different words that might have some significant meaning beyond their exterior. Certain ideas became popular, the word "food" was used increasingly in the record catalogs during the Depression. I finally analyzed the catalogs rather than the records, because you can't do anything with such a small sample as there is in that set.
To me the Anthology was more of a statement of interrelationships than a sampling.
Well, the problems that were involved in those interrelationships have been solved since then, so there is no particular reason to bring those records out. They aren't as relevant— there isn't as great a possibility of them doing good, as certain other things might. Like I have all these recordings of the Peyote ritual, Kiowa Indian music, that I recorded in Oklahoma. Its release has been held up for years because I haven't completed the cover.
Came the end of the war, there was a boom here. At that time we paid $10,000 to an artist, and Disc had the top jazz artists. We issued Jazz at the. Philharmonic in close cooperation with Norman Grantz who lent me the money to do it. Grant* later retired a millionaire when he used the money from his Verve Records to buy Picassos by the square inch.
But by 1947, I went bankrupt for $.300,000 and started Folkways Records. People who were involved in folk music between 1939 and 1947 knew what I was doing. I was the only one during those years who was documenting and issuing anything of consequence. In those days there was a union strike and nobody wanted to hire musicians so they came to me. The GPs were coming back from the war bringing songs. Pete Seeger came back then with anti war and antiarmy songs that talked about the Lieutenant who was selling shoes to the private; songs also about the housing, the prices and all that business.
So when I started issuing records again in 1947, this man, the closest I guess to Woody Guthrie as a character, came to see me. He had heard about me. His name was Harry Smith.
Actually his interest was originally in the American Indians of the Northwest. That's how he became interested in music as such, and he documented very early. During the war, because he was so small, he was able to mount the guns in the fusilages of airplanes. He got extra pay and with all that money bought up records. That was also the same time when I bought my collection of '78s — a very large one.
Before the war, the record companies themselves decided what records would be allocated to dealers. The dealer, in order to have a Columbia franchise, for example, would have to take whatever Columbia sent him. Those were
the monopolistic days. Naturally, the hillbilly stuff, the country music and all of that they had to accept here (in N.Y.)— two of each or three
of each.
Then we had the shellac shortage during the war— Asia was cut off and they were using boat* for other things than shellac. So, in order to get shellac, the big companies offered eighteen or twenty cents for all the records dealers had in stock. New York Band and Instrument and all the other dealers I used to pick up records from had tables full of this stuff— the greatest music in the world that New Yorkers knew nothing about. Right?
Harry Smith had the same thing on the West Coast. He bought up thousands of records. He knew what he was doing because all this time he kept track of when the records were recorded and who recorded them. In those days, they issued catalogs that gave the date, the matrix number and the place of the session. In the early Victor and Columbia days, the dealer had all this information.
Harry Smith collected vast information. In addition to that, he is an intellect. He understood the content of the records. He knew their relationship to folk music, their relationship to English literature and their relationship to the world.
He came to me with this vast collection of records. He needed money desperately. All his life he needed money. lie got it from the Guggenheims or he got it from me or from others. He always needed money because he was always experimenting in the movies. He is quite a wellknown movie creator. That's an expensive th to work with.
Out of his collection, he came to me and said: "I»ok, this is what I want to do. I want to lay out the hook of notes. I want to do the whole thing. All I want to be sure of is that they are issued;' Of course I was tremendously interested.
the people on the record.
The sad part of it is that afterwards when I wanted to issue Volumes IV and V we ran into the problem of everybody wanting to get into the act and nobody issuing a thing. The last effort, was John Cohen and Sam Charters but both nf them dropped the project. It was not pressure from other companies. Those people have never influenced me one way or the other. The real reason is I couldn't get the documentation.
The records were not available anymore. Harry had sold them to the New York Public Library— half of them. The other half I bought and Sam Charters went through them and we issued some of the things from the collection — Cajun and others on the RBF label.
No one knew the background of each record. Harry Smith disappeared. Then he started working on finger string games. Then he started working with the Seminole people, and now he is doing very well with moving pictures, so he dropped the whole project. Nobody picked it up at all. This is the horror.
It all is on tape. The problem is that Harry needed the records which were sent to the New York Public Library. The Library just taped it with no documentation at all and nobody has been able to reconstruct it. I have the tapes of Volumes IV and V but I can't get the documentation. There is no sense in just issuing it without the documentation.
The most important thing is the influence of the Anthology on people. It has been a take-off point for many of the younger musicians like Dave Bromberg, people like that. For the documented, the Anthology has set a standard. It's rather interesting that when the White House wanted to get a record collection, the first record they ordered was the Anthology.
Pete Seeger just went to Asia. He took a plane and even with all that weight he took the Anthology. Harold Leventhal went to India and took the Anthology with him. When people are interested in American folk music, it is one of the best examples.
Wherever I go, the first thing they ask me is: "Is it still in print? Is the Anthology of American Folk Music still in print?
In addition to the five songs in this collection from the projected fourth volume of the Anthology, there were twenty-three others planned by Harry Smith. They appear to have been issued mostly from the middle 30's through the war years and include artists like Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, The Arthur Smith Trio, Bradley Kincaid, J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers and Blind Alfred Reed.
In his interview with Harry Smith, John Cohen asks about the never issued Volume IV:
JC: You once told me of your many new plans for Vol IV. of the Anthology.
HS: The real reason that it didn't come out was that I didn't have sufficient interest in it. I wanted to make more of a content analysis. I made phonetic transcriptions of all the words in the songs, but those notebooks got lost. The content analysis was like how many times the word "railroad" was used during the Depression and how many times during the war. The proportions of different words that might have some significant meaning beyond their exterior. Certain ideas became popular, the word "food" was used increasingly in the record catalogs during the Depression. I finally analyzed the catalogs rather than the records, because you can't do anything with such a small sample as there is in that set.
To me the Anthology was more of a statement of interrelationships than a sampling.
Well, the problems that were involved in those interrelationships have been solved since then, so there is no particular reason to bring those records out. They aren't as relevant— there isn't as great a possibility of them doing good, as certain other things might. Like I have all these recordings of the Peyote ritual, Kiowa Indian music, that I recorded in Oklahoma. Its release has been held up for years because I haven't completed the cover.
