“Raised by the Railroad Line” was written by Paul Craft, the Memphis-born songwriter whose other songs include “Keep Me from Blowing Away,” “Midnight Flyer” and “Brother Jukebox.” Craft spent his first ten years on his family’s plantation in Proctor, Arkansas, played banjo with Jimmy Martin’s Sunny Mountain Boys on a tour in 1960 while still a student at the University of Virginia, and began writing songs at 28. In Virginia he had met the banjo player Ben Eldridge and the singer John Starling, and when the two of them formed the Seldom Scene in 1971 with Mike Auldridge, John Duffey and Tom Gray, the new band took up Craft’s songs.
The Seldom Scene recorded “Raised by the Railroad Line” on 26 March 1972 at R. D. Homer Associates in Clinton, Maryland, and made it the opening track of their first album, Act 1 (Rebel SLP 1511), released that year. Starling sang lead and played guitar, with Auldridge singing tenor and playing Dobro, Duffey singing high baritone and playing mandolin, Eldridge on banjo and Gray on bass. Another Craft song, “Want of a Woman,” came from the same session.
The song is a list of things a boy takes in from growing up beside the tracks: the clatter of a southbound freight and the hum of a passenger train, the whistle at the road crossing, military and farm machinery riding past on flatcars, pennies laid on the rail to be flattened by the wheels, the engineer in his cap and the brakeman waving from the caboose. The refrain keeps returning to the same idea: all of it has become part of the boy who grew up there.
Other bands picked it up quickly. Pony Express, a group on the same label, recorded it in August 1972 for their own Rebel album, the Swedish family band Blue Grass Swedes put it on Midnight Cowboys (Rondo, 1973), and the English group Orange Blossom included it on Keep On Pushing (Westwood, 1974). The Seldom Scene returned to it on 10 November 1986 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, with Bobby Hicks added on fiddle, for 15th Anniversary Celebration (Sugar Hill, 1988), and Rebel later took its title for a 2001 Seldom Scene compilation of train songs. Craft recorded the song himself, with Charlie Sizemore singing tenor, on Brother Jukebox (Strictly Country, 1998), and in 2002 the same Dutch label issued a Craft album named after it.
