William Kindt
Musician
Best known for
Songwriter
William Kindt was a turn-of-the-twentieth-century American songwriter credited with the 1904 lyric “The Wabash Cannon Ball” — a rewriting of J. A. Roff’s 1882 railroad song “The Great Rock Island Route” that swapped in the legendary Wabash Railroad and amplified the train’s mythic status. The Carter Family carried Kindt’s version into the country canon in 1929, and Roy Acuff turned it into a standard in the 1940s.
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- Encountered the 1882 sheet music for J. A. Roff’s “The Great Rock Island Route” and rewrote it in 1904 under the new title “The Wabash Cannon Ball.”
- Replaced Roff’s Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad with the Wabash — even though no train of that name was running on the Wabash line at the time — and added the verses that fixed the song’s outsize, almost folkloric character.
- His 1904 lyric is the version that entered oral tradition and that became the source for nearly every later recording.
- The Carter Family cut “Wabash Cannonball” in 1929; Roy Acuff’s 1936 and 1947 recordings made it a country standard, and it has since been recorded by everyone from Johnny Cash to Bill Monroe.