Norman Blake wrote “Green Light on the Southern” in the 1980s. In the liner notes to his 2011 album Green Light on the Southern he calls it a boyhood recollection of summer days along the Southern Railroad in Sulphur Springs, Georgia, in the 1940s; the old Alabama Great Southern, he adds, is now the Norfolk Southern. In the same notes he writes that two things had been constant in his life, the guitar and the A.G.S., and that as a boy he hung out down on that railroad, to the great dismay of his mother, who feared he would get his foot stuck in a switch point.
The lyric is a railfan’s eye view of that line, set on a dry, hot August day. The singer stands on the sidetrack at the south end of town, where the steam pipe is blowing down and a fireman is oiling the valve gears while the crew waits for the fast mail train and the semaphore to clear. An engineer in the high cab holds a gold watch in his hand and lets down the sand; farther along, the section houses sit by the yard limit sign on a weed-grown branch line, and a ten-car local freight rolls toward Birmingham. The last verse names the road outright, “the Alabama Great Southern, A.G.S. railroad line,” and the refrain is a wish to go back to those boyhood days and that green light on the Southern.
The earliest release found is by Tony Rice, who put it on Me & My Guitar (Rounder, 1986), where it sits fourth on the record, after James Taylor’s title song, Ian Tyson’s “Four Strong Winds” and Gordon Lightfoot’s “Walls.” The following year Blake sang it himself on Blake & Rice (Rounder, 1987), a duet record with Rice recorded at Bias Recording Studios in Springfield, Virginia, with the two men playing guitars. Blake recorded it again for the 2011 album that takes its title from the song, and in 2022 Bob Minner included it on From Sulphur Springs to Rising Fawn: The Songs of Norman Blake (Engelhardt Music Group).
