The purpose of this research is to examine the use of the train as a metaphor in the blues musical form from the 1900s to the 1950s. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context for discussion of the blues by describing how the form emerged in the culture, and then to show, with reference to specific songs, crucial points of connection between the form and the uses to which the image of the train has been put by it.
The blues musical form is often described as a subset or form of jazz (Funk & Wagnalls; Green 121), and that is perfectly the case to the extent that the blues motif is typical of many jazz performances. Additionally, blues and jazz are associated with the American black socio-cultural experience. But the blues as a musical form has a more reliable provenance in folk music, slave work songs, and Negro spirituals of earlier centuries, and it can be argued that jazz grew out of the blues. The fact that the blues as a standard musical form of the twentieth century is properly associated with jazz and considered a kind of jazz has to be set beside the fact that as a species of jazz it takes its emotional power from pre-20th-century motifs. The intersection of motifs, together with the analytical problems that the intersection presents, is best summarized by Green.
Nobody has ever decided to the satisfaction of anyone else where the "folk" music of, say, the itinerant guitarists of the Southwest and jazz proper begins. But, indisputably, by the beginning of the 20th century, a few jazz forms had begun to combine into a recognizable tradition, and the hub of this development was located at the Louisiana seaport of New Orleans, where the dominant form among jazz musicians was the blues. . . .
Much of the confusion over the identity of the blues has been caused by . . . misconceptions . . . that all blues music must by definition be concerned with depressed subjects and even that only depressed musici...