“Long Hot Summer Days” is a John Hartford song about work on a towboat. Hartford recorded it for Mark Twang (Flying Fish, 1976), an album he made alone in the studio with fiddle, banjo and guitar. On this track he plays fiddle and keeps time with his feet. The album drew on his years on the rivers: Hartford earned a steamboat pilot’s licence in the 1970s and worked as a towboat pilot on the Mississippi, Illinois and Tennessee Rivers.
The lyric is a deckhand’s day, one verse after another ending on the same hot summer afternoon. The crew is gathering empty barges on the Illinois River, working a stretch for which they earn a half day off with pay for every day on the job. The singer pictures a girl in Pekin sitting by her window fan, contrasts the previous night’s supper with today’s chicken consommé and a fruit jar of iced tea, and names the towns where the boat has put a man ashore (Beardstown) and where he plans to get off himself (Alton).
Sara Watkins included the song on her self-titled solo album (Nonesuch, April 2009), with Tim O’Brien singing harmony. The Turnpike Troubadours recorded it as “Long Hot Summer Day,” the closing track of their album Diamonds & Gasoline, released on 31 August 2010 and produced by Mike McClure. A retrospective on the album’s fifteenth anniversary called it a rather obscure Hartford song that the band made into an independent country hit, and noted that it is their most-streamed song, helped by baseball players choosing it as their walk-up music.
