The green diamond was the wonderful symbol for the passenger services of the Chicago and Illinois Railroad. The railway styled itself the Mainline of Mid-America…and provided a range of Streamline and Pullman services between Chicago and various big cities to the west and south. The main line basically follows the Mississippi river to the south.
The most famous service of the Chicago and Illinois was the City of New Orleans Streamliner which ran between Chicago and New Orleans…
In addition to the Streamliner service, the railroad also ran a full Pullman service.
Yesterday, I wrote a short account of where the sound of the railways comes from. This attempted to make the point that the rhythm of the rails, in song, is determined by the track…the engine and the speed adding additional elements. The journey starts, in New Orleans, with delta blues and ends, in Chicago, with rhythm and blues, jazz, soul and gospel. Brilliant.
On this blog, I write about aspects of design in relation to the railway because the railway system provides the best example of a mature and networked machine-ensemble. I’ve already written about how, as the machine-ensemble gets bigger and accelerated, it produces its own image culture designed to be engaged with at speed. Obviously, posters are a perfect exemplar of this phenomenon…Recently, I’ve begun to post a series of notes about the relationship between railways and music, especially in it’s orchestral, machine-noise and popular forms.
In relation to American popular music, the City of New Orleans route provides one of the foundation myths of musical development.
The American Civil War (1861-1865) effectively liberated the slave populations of the Southern US states and the Confederacy. This was an economic, and social, objective of the Union so as to facilitate the appropriation of labour into the developing industrial base of Chicago and Illinois. So, from the mid-19C onwards, there was a steady flow of migration northwards from the delta to the mid-west.
The migration took the music of the south, in its delta blues and gospel forms, and gave it the rhythm and drive of the tracks…By a happy co-incidence, the railroad passed through the city of Memphis too, where Stax records grew to become an important part of the story, along with Elvis. In Memphis, (train) rhythm and (delta) blues combined to become the source-code for rock-and-roll and subsequent R+B.
The combination of old-school blues style and rock-and-roll amplification was especially popular in the UK where it gave rise to the most enduring of sounds…see Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin etc etc. There’s a branch-line from Memphis to the UK.
Here’s a note that I found online…
Tennessee is pop music’s Mesopotamia. Forget Liverpool, London, New York, or Chicago. If you want to experience the full then and now of the popular music spectrum, you need to head down south. In basic terms, Nashville gave birth to country. Memphis gave birth to rock & roll. As usual, the story is not really that simple. Both cities played a big part as crossroads for the spread of gospel, blues, soul, R&B, and jazz. Both were way stations where musicians passed through or put down roots, learning from others who were doing the same.
Needless to say there’s been a fierce rivalry between all these places as being the wellspring of popular music in the US. That’s daft, they’re all winners, and there are lots of other places beside too.
In the 1920s there was second great northwards migration out of New Orleans as a consequence of a prohibitionist anxieties about coloured music and low morals…it wasn’t rock-and-roll yet, but the sex and drugs were already attached in the minds of the new moralists. The influx of jazz musicians into Chicago helped to create the modern and secular form of gospel as Motown soul.
This story shows how culture, geography and technology combine, through people, into new and exciting forms…and as a movement.
And by a happy co-incidence, here is Johnny Cash singing about exactly this…
