Train on the Island

Peer was struck by the sound of the pair, a throwback to the early string bands made of just a fiddle and a banjo, and invited them to New York, all expenses paid, to record more. Nester refused to leave his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and the partnership did not record again. Edmonds, who held his fiddle against his chest in the old way, became a local star in later years, playing the Galax Old Fiddler’s Convention and hosting a radio show called The Old Timers.

The 1927 recording was later chosen by Harry Smith for his Anthology of American Folk Music, issued by Folkways in 1952.

The words are a run of short, separate pictures hung on a single refrain. The singer hears the train whistle on the island and sends word to his true love with each verse: that he is sick and cannot go, that he is so lonesome he could die, that the train is making time and she is coming down the line, that he is happy, that he has gone as far as he can go. Each line is repeated in the same pattern before the next verse begins.