I am a Dead fan, and I was wondering about the real Casey Jones. Was he really a conductor? A friend of mine swears it is just a song, but a couple of dead friends say it is a true story. So with the risk of sounding uneducated in my history (and Dead songs) I ask please tell me about Casey Jones.
Unless you’re an American werewolf, I wouldn’t trust those friends unless they’re capitalized first.
But a potentially reliable source (with cites) is here :
True story of Casey Jones.
You could also try typing ‘Casey Jones’ into a search engine if you want even more information.
panama jack
oops. Dead friends. lol!!
Caution! A dyed-in-the-wool railroad fan is on the SDMB! Casey Jones was a turn-of-the-century engineer on the Illinois Central. This was the ‘Glory Days’ of railroading, when regulation was non-existant and the job was pretty dangerous. Casey Jones was trying to get his train, the Cannonball Express, into the station on time, but he crashed into the back of a freight train that had broken down ahead of him, and was killed in the wreck. He became a martyr for railroad workers everywhere after someone wrote a song about the accident. If you’re my age (mid twenties) or older and you got the Disney Channel as a child, you might have seen a cartoon they made about the wreck.
There are fourteen different versions of the Casey Jones ballad presewrved in the Archives of American Folksong in the Library of Congress, a monument to Casey Jones in Cayce, Kentucky, and in 1950 the US Government issued a 3-cent stamp in honor of American railroad engineers, which bears a portrait of Casey Jones and a picture of Engine 382.
According to the story, Jones, in an attempt to make up lost time, crashed his engine into the rear of a stalled freight train near Vaughan, Mississippi. Robert Hunter took considerable license with the legend when he wrote the lyrics for the Dead’s version…adding “the switchman sleeping,” “Train 102 is on the wrong track,” and even a mysterious “lady in red.” Not to mention the cocaine.