On 27 September 1903 the Southern Railway’s Fast Mail, train No. 97, left Monroe, Virginia, an hour late on its run to Spencer, North Carolina. Coming down a heavy grade toward the Stillhouse Trestle near Danville, the engineer, Joseph A. “Steve” Broady, could not slow enough for the curve, and the train left the bridge and fell into the ravine. Of the eighteen men aboard, eleven died, Broady among them, and seven were hurt. The railroad blamed him for running at more than seventy miles an hour.
The ballad follows the run closely. Steve gets his orders at Monroe with the warning that he is behind time and must reach Spencer on schedule. He tells the fireman to shovel on more coal, and the train takes the long grade between Lynchburg and Danville too fast. He is found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle, scalded by the steam. A telegram carries the news to Washington, and the last verse turns to the wives at home, warning them never to speak harshly to a husband who may not come back. The song is sung to the tune of Henry Clay Work’s “The Ship That Never Returned.”
The Library of Congress dates the first commercial recording to Henry Whitter in late 1923. Ernest Thompson recorded “The Wreck of the Southern Old ’97” for Columbia in New York on 26 April 1924. Vernon Dalhart’s version, made for Victor in New York on 13 August 1924 with Carson Robison on guitar, came out on Victor 19427 with “The Prisoner’s Song” on the other side. That record’s sales carried “Old 97” into a huge number of homes. Its success led to a long lawsuit. David Graves George, who said he had written the words, sued the Victor Talking Machine Company, and a federal district court upheld his claim on 31 March 1933. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1934 on a question of jurisdiction, and it ended in November 1939 when the Court declined to hear George’s final petition. Research by Robert Winslow Gordon, the first head of the Library of Congress’s Archive of Folk Song, supported the view that Fred Lewey and Charles W. Noell had as good a claim to the words. Gordon had recorded Lewey singing “The Old Ninety Seven” in Concord, North Carolina, in October 1925. Later records often credit Whitter, Noell and Lewey together.
Ernest V. Stoneman sang it with his family band on the Folkways LP Old-Time Tunes of the South (1957). Mac Wiseman recorded it in Nashville in January 1959 for Great Folk Ballads (Dot). Lester Flatt, Earl Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys cut it at Columbia’s Nashville studio on 24 September 1962, with Flatt singing, Buck Graves on dobro, Paul Warren on fiddle and Jake Tullock on bass. It came out in February 1963 on Hard Travelin’.
