“Glendale Train” was written by John “Marmaduke” Dawson, the lead singer and chief songwriter of the New Riders of the Purple Sage, and recorded for the band’s self-titled 1971 Columbia debut. The song is one of Dawson’s narrative pieces in the Western-outlaw tradition, anchored to the 1879 train robbery near Glendale, Missouri carried out by Frank and Jesse James and their gang.
The New Riders were closely entwined with the Grateful Dead in the period — Jerry Garcia played pedal steel on the studio album and the band shared bills with the Dead through the early 1970s — and the recorded version sits in the country-rock register that defined the early NRPS sound. The lyric tells the robbery from a distance: shotguns, the loot, the sheriff coming on, the gang scattering into the brush, the narrator imagining the chase in the way an older cowboy ballad would.
The bluegrass life of the song is largely a function of the late-1970s and 1980s acoustic-rock-into-bluegrass crossover — the same channel that brought “Friend of the Devil,” “Panama Red,” and parts of the New Riders songbook into festival jams. It works as a moderate-up-tempo vocal piece in G with banjo and fiddle breaks, and the narrative shape gives a singer plenty to work with.
