HV043- Go By Train

Hearing Voices from NPR®
043 Go By Train: Riding the Rails
Host: Calvin Johnson of K Records
Airs week of: 2010-06-30 (Originally: 2008-12-24)

“Go By Train” (52:00 mp3):

Musician Calvin Johnson (of the band Beat Happening, and owner of K Records) hosts train tales:

An existential interaction with an automated Amtrak voice.

Calvin reads from his Great Aunt Grace’s diary of a 1891 train ride from Boston to San Francisco.

The Kronos Quartet performs the first movement of Steve Reich‘s Different Trains.

In the Song & Memory series, musician Jules Shear recalls singing for a school principal while riding the rails as a kid.

From Holding On: Dreamers, Visionaries, Eccentrics And Other American Heroes, a portrait of a pullman porter.

Short Stop tells some track-hopping traveling tales.

Circus performer Little Jack Horton and poet Charles Bukowski steal a train, from Tom Russell‘s Hotwalker: Charles Bukowski And A Ballad For Gone America.

Segregated train-travel from the Jim Crow days.

Another Sound-Portraits production, this one on the world’s largest model railroad.

Other music: “Mr Train” Phil Bo and the Vikings, “Morning Train Blues” Peter Warfield, “The Rambler” Cisco Houston, 900 Miles and other R.R. Songs, “Alphabet Route” Chessie Manifest. Train Sounds: Thunder on the Steel. Photo by W.H. Jackson, from the Library of Congress.