“Train on the Island” is an old-time banjo and fiddle song from the Virginia and North Carolina mountains. It was recorded in 1927 at the Bristol sessions by the banjo player J.P. Nestor and the fiddler Norman Edmonds, and later reached a wide audience through the Anthology of American Folk Music.
Like many old-time songs, it is a loose gathering of verses set to a driving tune. The train of the title runs through lines of courting and parting and restlessness, the words less a story than a string of feelings carried along by the music.
Nestor, who refused to leave his Blue Ridge home to record again, left only a few sides, but this one endured.
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