Steve Goodman 1971
Goodman died in 1984 of leukemia at the age of 36. The song was written after taking a trip with his wife to see her grandmother, riding the City of New Orleans, the day train running from Chicago to the title city. (The night train at that point was still the Panama Limited, immortalized by Booker White in the 1930s.) When he got back, a friend mentioned that Amtrak was planning to discontinue the train, so he wrote the song as an elegy – which may have contributed to the fact that a train of this name is still running today (though now it’s the night train). Steve described the lyric as pretty much straight reportage, a list of what he saw out the window, except for the third verse, which he had to make up since he was only going to southern Illinois: “I figured I couldn’t write a song about a train that went 900 miles through the center of the country and stop the song in Mattoon because I was getting off.”
Arlo Guthrie: The City of New Orleans
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSeqrkRT1t0
Riding on the City of New Orleans Illinois Central, Monday morning rail Fifteen cars and fifteen restless riders Three conductors and twenty-five sacks of mail All along the southbound odyssey The train pulls out at Kankakee And rolls along past houses, farms and fields Passing trains that have no name And freight yards full of old black men And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles Chorus: Good morning America, how are you Say, don’t you know me, I’m your native son I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done Dealing card games with the old men in the club car Penny a point, ain’t no one keeping score Pass the paper bag that holds the bottle Feel the wheels rumbling ‘neath the floor And the sons of pullman porters And the sons of engineers Ride their fathers’ magic carpets made of steel And mothers with their babes asleep Are rockin’ to the gentle beat And the rhythm of the rails is all they feel Nighttime on the City of New Orleans Changing cars in Memphis, Tennessee Half way home, we’ll be there by morning Through the Mississippi darkness rolling down to the sea But all the towns and people seem To fade into a bad dream And the steel rail still ain’t heard the news The conductor sings his songs again The passengers will please refrain This train got the disappearing railroad blues