“Steamboat Whistle Blues” was written by John Hartford and recorded in Nashville for his 1971 album Aereo-Plain on Warner Bros. Hartford was born in New York City in 1937 and grew up in St. Louis, where he took his first job on the Mississippi at 16; in the 1970s he earned a steamboat pilot’s license and worked summers as a pilot on the Julia Belle Swain.
The song is a comic complaint from a man who set out to be a towboat man but never got the hang of the ratchet bar. He came up deckhanding in the Illinois coal trade, and was stuck in the ice on Christmas Eve, shivering with what he calls the steamboat whistle blues. He tips his hat to a Captain Way and goes on to the city, which has grown up square like a crossword puzzle, where the courthouse is gone, the grass is synthetic and the only thing he trusts is the blues themselves. A friend named Johnny tells him that bluegrass is a thing of the past, and rock and roll too; the singer lends him a few dollars and says that some day he will tear off down the river, then come back.
The track was recorded at Glaser Sound Studios in Nashville with Hartford on banjo and lead vocal, Norman Blake on guitar, Tut Taylor on Dobro, Vassar Clements on fiddle and Randy Scruggs on bass; David Bromberg produced the album. Aereo-Plain reached number 193 on the Billboard 200 and has been called a forerunner of what is now known as newgrass. Rounder reissued it on CD in 1995.
