Railroad Bill [Laws I13]

DESCRIPTION: Railroad Bill "never worked and never will"; he drinks, steals, and travels from town to town. His career finally ends when he is shot (and/or arrested). To the very end, all he does is "ride, ride, ride"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1911 (Odum, according to Cohen)
KEYWORDS: rambling robbery crime death train
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
March 7, 1897 - Death of Morris Slater, known as "Railroad Bill"
FOUND IN: US(SE) New Zealand
REFERENCES (18 citations):
Laws I13, "Railroad Bill"
Cohen-LongSteelRail, pp. 122-131, "Railroad Bill" (2 texts plus many excerpts, 1 tune)
Sandburg-TheAmericanSongbag, pp. 384-385, "Railroad Bill" (1 text, 1 tune -- perhaps bowdlerized to eliminate Bill's death)
Brown/Belden/Hudson-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore3 504, "A Thirty-Two Special on a Forty-Four Frame" (1 two-line fragment, with lyrics sometimes associated with this song)
Brown/Schinhan-FrankCBrownCollectionNCFolklore5 504, "A Thirty-two Special on a Forty-Four Frame" (note only, stating that the tune cannot be found)
Rosenbaum-FolkVisionsAndVoices, pp. 194-195, "Railroad Bill" (1 short text, 1 tune)
Scarborough-OnTheTrailOfNegroFolkSongs, pp. 251-253, "It's Lookin' fer Railroad Bill" (2 texts plus some small pieces, which might be "Joseph Mica" rather than this)
Lomax-FolkSongsOfNorthAmerica 304, "Railroad Bill" (1 text, 1 tune)
Lomax/Lomax-AmericanBalladsAndFolkSongs, pp. 118-120, "Railroad Bill" (1 text, 1 tune)
Burt-AmericanMurderBallads, pp. 201-202, "(Railroad Bill)" (1 text)
Colquhoun-NZ-Folksongs-SongOfAYoungCountry, p. 79, "Railway Bill" (1 text, 1 tune, short and with little plot except a statement that Bill doesn't work like other railroad employees, but it has this chorus) (p. 57 in the 1972 edition)
Cohen-AmericanFolkSongsARegionalEncyclopedia1, pp. 329-330, "Railroad Bill" (1 text)
Shay-BarroomBallads/PiousFriendsDrunkenCompanions, pp. 48-49, "Railroad Bill" (1 text, 1 tune)
Cohen/Seeger/Wood-NewLostCityRamblersSongbook, p. 148, "Railroad Bill" (1 text, 1 tune)
Darling-NewAmericanSongster, pp. 240-242, "Railroad Bill" (2 texts)
Silber/Silber-FolksingersWordbook, p. 99 "Railroad Bill" (1 text)
MidwestFolklore, W. L. McAtee, "Some Folklore of Grant County, Indiana, in the Nineties," Volume 1, Number 4 (WInter 1951), p. 260, "(Bad Bill from Bunker Hill)" (1 short text, probably this)
DT 662, (RRBILL*)
Roud #4181
RECORDINGS:
Marilyn Bennett, "Railway Bill" (on NZSongYngCntry)
Vera Hall, "Railroad Bill" (AFS 1315 B2, 1323 A3; 1937)
Willie Hill, "Railroad Bill" (on FolkVisions2)
Frank Hutchison, "Railroad Bill" (OKeh 45425, 1930; rec. 1929)
John Jackson, "Railroad Bill" (on ClassAfrAm)
Otis Mote, "Railroad Bill" (OKeh 45389, 1929)
Riley Puckett, "Railroad Bill" (Columbia 15040-D, 1925; Silvertone 3258, 1926)
Roba Stanley, Bob Stanley & (?) Patterson, "Railroad Bill" (OKeh 40295, 1925; rec. 1924)
Hobart Smith, "Railroad Bill" (on LomaxCD1705) (Disc 6081, rec. 1946)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Right On, Desperado Bill" (character of Railroad Bill)
NOTES [240 words]: Burt-AmericanMurderBallads reports that Morris Slater, known as "Railroad Bill," "terrorized" Florida and Alabama from 1894 to 1897, initially robbing freight trains, but later perhaps branching out; an Alabama deputy was killed during the saga, and Slater was blamed.
Slater was eventually surrounded and surprised in a grocery, "eating crackers and cheese"; he probably could have been taken, but the posse shot him instead.
Burt-AmericanMurderBallads's version of the ballad specifically mentions the crackers and cheese, but Laws is rather cautious in reporting Burt-AmericanMurderBallads's story, and I have to agree with him: I don't think we can prove Burt-AmericanMurderBallads's Alabama version (published 1927) to be the original.
Cohen adds even more data, noting a number of the parts of "Railroad Bill" seem to precede Slater. Either there was another "Railroad Bill," or the song adapted a large number of other railroad bits.
A photo of Slater's corpse, being examined or guarded by Leonard McGowan (a sheriff and one of the men who killed him) can be found on p. 135 of Richard Polenberg: Hear My Sad Story: The True Tales That Inspired Stagolee, John Henry, and Other Traditional American Folk Songs, Cornell University Press, 2015. Polenberg also has a list of articles on the subject; the literature on Railroad Bill seems surprisingly short for someone so widely known and feared. Maybe it's because he was Black. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.8
File: LI13

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