Tony Rice
Mr. Engineer
“Mr. Engineer” was co-written by Jimmy Martin and Paul Williams and first recorded by Jimmy Martin and the Sunny Mountain Boys on October 30, 1961, with the recording released in June 1966 on the album Mr. Good ‘n Country Music. Williams (who played mandolin and sang tenor with Martin during this period) and Martin co-wrote a number of pieces during their late-1950s and early-1960s collaboration; “Mr. Engineer” stands among the most enduring of those compositions.
The song belongs to the family of bluegrass railroad songs — the singer addressing the locomotive engineer directly, asking him to push the train faster so the singer can get home to his loved one. The premise sits comfortably alongside “Fireball Mail,” “Orange Blossom Special,” and the broader train-song tradition that runs through country and bluegrass music. Jimmy Martin’s high-lonesome vocal delivery on the original recording set the canonical reading.
The song’s pivotal contemporary moment came in 1977, when Tony Rice cut a version that brought it to a younger acoustic-music audience and made it a staple of his live show during his strongest vocal years. The song has since been recorded by J.D. Crowe and the New South, Knoxville Grass, the Grassland Bluegrass Band, and many others, and has been a particular favorite for contemporary bluegrass acts revisiting Jimmy Martin’s catalog. Paul Williams was inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
