J. A. Roff
Musician
Best known for
Songwriter
J. A. Roff was the nineteenth-century author of “The Great Rock Island Route” (1882), the railroad song whose chorus — “listen to the jingle, and the rumble, and the roar” — carried over almost intact into William Kindt’s 1904 rewrite “The Wabash Cannon Ball.” That second version became, by way of the Carter Family and Roy Acuff, one of the most-recorded songs in American country music.
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- Published “The Great Rock Island Route” in 1882; the lyric celebrated the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, incorporated in 1851.
- Wrote at least two versions of the song; both shared a chorus close to what generations of singers later learned as “Wabash Cannonball.”
- William Kindt rewrote the lyric in 1904, swapping the Rock Island line for the Wabash Railroad and retitling the piece “The Wabash Cannon Ball.”
- Kindt’s version — built directly on Roff’s — entered oral tradition; the Carter Family cut it in 1929 and Roy Acuff in 1936 and 1947, after which the song became a country, bluegrass, and folk standard.