“Big Black Train” was written by Troy Martin and Stanley Johnson and first recorded by Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1958. It uses one of the most enduring images in country and gospel song — the train as the carrier of death — turning a literal locomotive into a figure for the journey out of this life.
The song treats that big black train as an emblem of mortality and a warning to set things right before it arrives, since once it does there is no getting off. That blend of foreboding and exhortation is squarely in the tradition of bluegrass songs that face death plainly and without flinching.
The song became a quiet standard. The Bluegrass Album Band recorded it on The Bluegrass Album, Vol. 5: Sweet Sunny South in 1989, and the Earls of Leicester later revived it as part of their dedicated revisiting of the Flatt and Scruggs catalog.
