“Wabash Cannonball” grew out of a nineteenth-century railroad song, catalogued in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 4228. The earliest known printing is sheet music titled “The Great Rock Island Route,” published by J. A. Roff in 1882. William Kindt rewrote it in 1904 as “Wabash Cannon Ball,” and his version stayed in print under his name; a 1943 edition arranged by Hugo Frey still carries the 1904 copyright.
The Carter Family recorded it for Victor on 24 November 1929. Victor did not release it until 1932, on a record backed with the group’s 1928 “Meet Me by Moonlight, Alone.” The Victor issue credits the song to A. P. Carter.
Roy Acuff and his Crazy Tennesseans recorded it in Chicago on 21 October 1936, during their first sessions for the American Record Corporation, with Jess Easterday on guitar, Clell Summey on dobro, Red Jones on bass and Sam Hatcher on harmonica. That record was held back until December 1938, when it came out on Vocalion and Conqueror with “Freight Train Blues.” Columbia reissued it in 1946, and on 28 January 1947 Acuff recorded it again with the Smoky Mountain Boys at the CBS studio in Hollywood for Columbia, with Art Satherley producing.
The lyric sings the praises of the express. Acuff’s text sends it from the Atlantic to the Pacific shore, through a run of cities from New York and St. Louis to Chicago and the hills of Minnesota, and closes on the rush of the engine and the call of a lonesome hobo along the line.
The song in turn named a real train: the Wabash Railroad gave the name Wabash Cannon Ball to its daytime express between Detroit and St. Louis around 1950, and the train kept the name until Amtrak took over passenger service in 1971. Woody Guthrie set new words to the tune for “Grand Coulee Dam,” written about the dam in Washington State.
