“The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore” was written by the Kentucky folk singer Jean Ritchie. She released it in 1965, at first under the name Than Hall — her grandfather’s name — because she felt uneasy about putting her own name to a song so pointed about the coal industry.
The title’s L&N is the Louisville and Nashville Railroad, which once carried coal out of eastern Kentucky and ran passenger trains past mountain communities. The song mourns what happened when the mines closed and the trains stopped: a hollow emptied of work, of money, and of the life it once held.
The song became a standard of the Appalachian and folk repertoire, recorded by Johnny Cash, Kathy Mattea, and others.
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