Steve Earle’s son has been on here twice, but it seemed about time to write up the legend himself. We’ve been perhaps a little remiss in our attention to his sprawling discography, but a road trip spin of The Mountain brought this excellent train song to mind. The album came out in 1999 and its a collaboration between Earle and the bluegrass outfit the DelMcCoury Band. Its a great record, by the way, blending rousing bluegrass instrumentation with powerful lyrics and Earle’s unmatchable vocals, and it also happens to includes one of our favorite Civil War songs, Dixieland, based on a character from the Gettysburg novel, Killer Angels. If there’s one thing we love as much as train songs, its Civil War songs, but that’s definitely a topic for another blog…
In this tune, Earle reminisces about the Texas Eagle, an old train that since has been shut down and sold to Mexico. His grandfather was a “railroad man” who took Earle for a ride on the Texas Eagle “‘fore its gone.” The blue and silver train eventually did bite the dust, as the line went under and the train was sold to Mexico. Earle laments that “nowaday’s they don’t make no trains,” a common lament in backwards-looking train songs like this. But even though the train is gone, the memory of the whistle lingers as a haunting reminder of past glories.
The Texas Eagle route historically ran from 1948 to 1970 was under control of the Missouri Pacific Railroad and the Texas & Pacific Railway. Like many of the beloved passenger rail routes of yore, like the Southern Crescent, City of New Orleans, and Southern Pacific, Amtrak revived the Texas Eagle name and stuck it on the passenger route from Chicago through Texas and on to the West Coast. But in Earle’s mind (and in the opinion of many others), these don’t match up to the old glamour lines – Earle derisively refers to the reincarnated routes as “them Amtrak things.”
So Texas Eagle fits right into the grand tradition of train songs that invoke trains for nostalgic purposes. The personalized story gives this one a little more power and lest anyone doubt Earle’s sincerity here, in a song-by-song writeup of the album Earle unequivocally declared, “every single word of this song is true.”