“Railroad Bill” is a traditional song built around the legend of an African American outlaw of the 1890s. The figure is usually identified as Morris Slater, a man who robbed freight trains along the Louisville & Nashville line through Alabama and Florida, throwing goods from the moving cars, until he was shot dead in an Alabama store in 1896.
Songs about “Railroad Bill” were being collected by folklorists within a decade or so of the outlaw’s death, and the song reached records in the 1920s, in an early version by Riley Puckett. It belongs to the broad family of African American “bad man” ballads, and it shares verses with other blues ballads of the era.
The song became a banjo and string-band favorite and passed into old-time and bluegrass tradition.
