Who was Casey Jones in the Grateful Dead song?
The Grateful Dead are synonymous with a few things. Among them are long, rambling songs, tie-dye colours, spin-off bands, side-projects, and drugs. They’d smoke joints like cigarettes, drop acid for breakfast and were even known to spike their support acts and friends. In fact, their music is so intertwined with stoner culture that calling someone a Deadhead or a pothead could almost be interchangeable phrases.
The Grateful Dead were not afraid of acid. They were not worried about weed or mad about mescaline use, and they were also cool with a little cocaine. A lot of their roundabout and meandering slow jams might have embodied the calming effects that a joint can have on a person, but one of their songs was written to exhibit a little more of a high-energy high.
“I always thought it’s a pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like. A little bit evil and hard-edged,” Jerry Garcia once said of the group’s 1970 song ‘Casey Jones’. “And also that sing-songy thing, because that’s what it is, a sing-songy thing, a little melody that gets in your head.”
From the album Workingman’s Dead, the song is—like so much of Jerry Garcia’s best work—rooted in a traditional folk and roots tune, ‘The Ballad of Casey Jones’, which the Dead had even previously played live. And, just like much of the Grateful Dead’s best work, the lyrics were written by Robert Hunter, with Garcia looking after the arrangement. In a 2015 interview, Hunter recalled writing the refrain, saying: “’Casey Jones’ didn’t start out as a song, it just suddenly popped into my mind: ‘Driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones, you better watch your speed.’ I just wrote that down and I went on to whatever else I was doing, and some time later I came across it and thought, ‘That’s the germ of a pretty good song.'”
The song might be a “pretty good musical picture of what cocaine is like”, but it actually tells the story of a real-life bad trip that didn’t rely on drugs to make things worse.
So, who is Casey Jones?
Casey Jones was an American railroadman who was killed when his passenger train collided with a stalled freight train in Vaughan, Mississippi, at the end of April 1900. A locomotive engineer, he had become notorious for his exceptionally punctual train schedules in the late 1800s and was not afraid to take a risk or two in pushing his engines to the limits to make it to the station on time.
When his fellow railroader Sam Tate reported ill on the night of April 29th, 1900, Casey Jones was asked to pick up an extra shift and run an additional train service. Having agreed to take up the extra work, Jones stayed up through the night and ran two additional train services before clocking in for his own shift. As a result, he was running behind schedule and determined to make up for lost time.
Departing Memphis 75 minutes later than he was supposed to, Jones was determined to prove that his train had not been nick-named Cannonball for nothing and was said to have topped 100 miles per hour through the rainy and foggy conditions, noting that “the old girl’s got her dancing slippers on tonight!”.
By the time he was on the final run, he had made up for most of the lost time. Having started 75 minutes behind schedule, Jones was due to pull into the station only two minutes later than the advertised arrival time.
Owing to the foggy and treacherous conditions, though, and travelling at such a speed, he didn’t realise until it was too late that the station was not ready for his arrival. Two freight trains and a caboose were blocking the tracks, forcing Jones into an emergency stop. He ordered his fellow crewmate to jump from the moving train to save himself while reducing the speed enough to save his passengers, just not himself.
Jones’ train collided head-on with the freighters, and the accident was described in detail by a report in a Jackson, Mississippi newspaper:
“The caboose and two of the cars were smashed to pieces, the engine left the rails and plowed into an embankment, where it overturned and was completely wrecked, the baggage and mail coaches also being thrown from the track and badly damaged. The engineer was killed outright by the concussion. His body was found lying under the cab, with his skull crushed and right arm torn from its socket.”
Jones was found with his watch in his hand, which had stopped at the time of impact, exactly at the time he was due to arrive at the station, despite the late start.
Jones may have lost his life in the collision, but in ordering his crewmate to abandon the vehicle and by slowing the train enough, he ensured that nobody else died in the crash. Soon after, the story passed into song, and Jones was immortalised by fellow singing train driver Wallace Saunders. Sung to the tune of a popular song of the time, ‘Jimmie Jones’, ‘The Ballad of Casey Jones’ passed into the folk canon before long and has been recorded by artists as varied as Johnny Cash, Bing Crosby, Burl Ives and Elizabeth Cotton.
He might have been notorious for moving at 100 miles an hour, but when Casey Jones was driving his train, there was no indication at all that he really was high on cocaine. Still, it wouldn’t be a Grateful Dead song without some narcotic connection.
