“Reuben” (and the closely related “Reuben’s Train” / “Old Reuben”) is a traditional Appalachian song and fiddle tune dating to the late 1800s, possibly derived from or related to the older folksong “900 Miles.” The song’s earliest documented form is from 1905, when two African American performers were heard singing a version in Florence County, South Carolina; in 1925 the folklorist Robert W. Gordon collected a version from Bascom Lamar Lunsford titled “Old Reuben,” with Lunsford reporting that he had been taught the song as a teenager in 1898 in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
The first commercial recording was made by Fiddlin’ John Carson in 1924, under the title “I’m Nine Hundred Miles From Home.” A 1927 Grayson and Whitter recording titled “Train 45” carried a related tune into the early country-music canon. Tommy Jarrell, the influential Mt. Airy, North Carolina, fiddler, learned “Reuben” from a hired hand on his father’s farm named Cockerham, and Jarrell’s playing became the canonical old-time-tradition source for many subsequent fiddlers and clawhammer banjo players.
The song is a railroad ballad — the narrator riding (or chasing) a train named Reuben, with the lyric collecting a pool of “floating” verses about wandering, separation, and longing that singers attach as the mood requires. “Reuben” / “Reuben’s Train” has been recorded by Woody Guthrie, Wade Mainer, the Dillards, Doc Watson, Martin Simpson, and many others, and remains one of the most widely played Appalachian tunes in the modern bluegrass and old-time repertoires.
