Heroes Of Hobo Nation
In advance of their sold-out show at the Cedar Cultural Center Monday, Americana superheroes Billy Bragg and Joe Henry talk trains, Trump, Brexit, America, Prince, and how to “Shine A Light” in these dark times
By Jim Walsh
Photo Credit Ray Foley
“This is an America I’ve never been to, this time. This is a different country than the one I’ve been coming to for the past 32 years,” Billy Bragg said to me by phone from a roadside stop in New Hampshire, in response to my question about what gives him hope about America these dark days. Then he let his words hang there on this, the day after the second presidential debate, to allow for a moment of silence and sanity.
Preach it, brother. Drastically different—not to mention angrier, and stupider. Ugh. The day-after-debate hangover was still fresh, the pessimism across this great land palpable and toxic.
“This is an America where a guy who openly declares himself to be a Democratic Socialist can come within a hair’s breath of getting the Democratic nomination, and that’s never happened in my lifetime, so I have a lot of hope,” continued Bragg, much to my surprise and delight. “Obviously, the two scary clowns arguing last night fills us all with dread. But let’s hope the rational America perseveres. The rationality has gone out the window with Trump.”
Ah, the audacity of hope and Bragg, who has been playing Minneapolis since the early ‘80s, and the truth is he got a lot of us through the Reagan-Bush years with his smart commentary, huge heart, soulful songwriting, and gutty performances at the 7th Street Entry and First Avenue. Now Braggy and his/your/our friend Joe Henry hit the Cedar Cultural Center Monday as part their “Shine A Light: Field Recordings From The Great American Railroad” tour. http://shinealight-joehenry.billybragg.co.uk
Inspired by Bragg’s fascination with the history of America and railroad songs, and a book he’s writing on the skiffle movement, the Billy-Joe collaboration (the two have known each other for 20 years and worked together on Bragg’s 2013 album “Tooth and Nail”) is a deep dive into America’s railroad song history. In March 2016, the duo boarded a train in Chicago and traveled West to the Mexican-American border and Los Angeles, recording tunes at train stops along the way.
The result is a haunting and timeless recording that speaks to the robust restlessness of America itself, with Billy-Joe breathing new life into classic railroad songs by Hank Williams, Glen Campbell, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Jimmie Rodgers and more. The tour launched in September and the train keeps a-rolling to the Cedar Cultural Center for a sold-out show Monday night. RIFT caught up with Bragg in New Hampshire and Henry from his home in Los Angeles to talk about the country they love and the music that inspires them:
RIFT: How did this project happen? When did you start talking about it?
Bragg: Over a year ago. I’ve been writing a book about skiffle, and railroad songs are absolutely crucial to that period in our history, and that’s what got me interested in train songs, and so I was looking in some way to connect to them, and I knew Joe was right for it.
Henry: I was committed to it right away, before Bill even laid out the [specifics].
Bragg: Train songs have played a really cool part in English history, because the American railroad folk songs, the ones we had in school, going back to Casey Jones, we don’t really have train songs in our tradition. In my country, the songs that are about people escaping jurisdiction or a bad romance, they tend to be sea shanties. Young British people put their foot in the ocean, as we say, to escape that. It’s not a railroad that’s going to another part of the empire.
RIFT: Here we are in the 21st century, and you guys are extolling the history and virtues of the railways. What do they have to say about the here and now in this technology-whipped world?
Bragg: Two things, really. They offer you a gateway to the past, in the sense that the railroad is probably the last part of the old weird America that still functions. The route that we followed to Los Angeles was laid down over 150 years ago by a man with different priorities. In the present, let’s remember that America relies heavily on the railroad for distribution. America puts more priority on the railroad than any other industrialized nation, so if the railroad disappeared tomorrow, your economy would be in real trouble.
So let’s not pretend the railroad isn’t important in America. But the idea of passenger travel outside the Northeast corridor doesn’t seem to be on people’s radar in the way that it is elsewhere. I think that’s why perhaps why an outsider’s eye recognizes that. The other thing is, it is the future. The possibility of the high speed railway, the bullet train, would give you the possibility of getting from Central Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco in the time it takes you to drive to LAX, get through security and get to the gate and get on the plane. And the railroad is much more ecologically sound than freighting stuff on trucks on airplanes. We wanted to be able to talk about all these things—it’s not just a nostalgia trip.
Henry: Us taking up these songs right now is like a theater company taking up “Richard III” or “King Lear” now. There’s real truth available, because there’s a slight distance from it, and when there’s distance, the old imagery is very reliable imagery. For example, when I was writing a song called “Like She Was A Hammer” on my album “Fuse.” When I wrote the line “like Roosevelt’s funeral in the rain,” it was originally “like Kennedy’s funeral,” but I pulled back because in that moment we haven’t really decided what the Kennedys mean, how trustworthy they are as images, because our ideas about that are shifting, but I believed in that moment that I knew what Roosevelt’s funeral is a reliable image.
So these songs speak from the past. They have a certain authority and a certain reliability, because there’s an aerial view they’re offering that’s historic and comprehensive and not beholden to the flightiness of a particular moment. They speak from a very fundamental archetypal truth about us as a country and as human beings, and maybe because they’re old and familiar, they slip right by our defenses and we think we know what they mean because we’ve been hearing them since we were kids. But these songs are like church elders, in a way.
RIFT: Hobos have a cartoonish quality in America, but they’re deeply imbedded in America’s psyche—the homeless, outsiders, and lost men. Did you feel the spirit of them as you made your way?
Bragg: I think we felt the spirit of people who are excluded from society. While we were traveling on the train, we talked a lot about Brexit, and what would happen if [Britain] left the European Union, and it was at the same time as Trump was talking about building the wall.
You know, the hobo is an economic migrant. He’s someone who’s kept out with billy clubs; kicked into camps just like we kicked the migrants into camps in Calais. You know, that romantic notion of the hobo… We finish the show with Woody’s “Ramblin’ Round,” and we have to make explicit that there are still economic migrants, people who are rambling around. And all of the aspirations in Woody’s songs are being built by those same people tonight, whether they’re trying to cross the Rio Grande or trying to get through the channel tunnel into my country. So it’s not just something in the past.
Henry: So often in these songs these hobos are refugees. They’re people who have been shamed, who are broken, who’ve left their families and are trying to bring back better and are failing, and are unseen among us. They are tragic and earnest and well-meaning figures. They’re not cartoons, they’re not people who are eschewing responsibility, they’re people for whom opportunity has been denied.
RIFT: Most of these songs are decades old. How do they resonate for you in the here and now?
Bragg: The thing about the railroad song is that they’re not usually actually about being on a train. Car songs tend to be about being in a car. If a plane goes through a song, it tends to be a plane. But a train is often a metaphor for something. If you think about “Folsom Prison Blues” by Johnny Cash: It’s not the prison bars that make him cry, it’s that lonesome whistle that makes him realize he’s not free. And it’s that metaphorical aspect of the railroad song that we found most attractive.
The railroad looms large in the American psyche. The only thing that looms larger is the frontier, but the frontier isn’t there anymore, the Old West isn’t there anymore. You can dress up and ride a horse but you’re not in the Old West. You can still get on a train. You can still buy a ticket and get on the railroad. It’s still there. It still plays a role in American life.
RIFT: As you went through America, the America we’re living in now, how did the tunes refract what’s going on, be it the Black Lives Matter movement, or the election, or just the gaping hole in the soul that seems to be ripped open this year?
Bragg: When we’re singing [Guthrie’s] “Hobo’s Lullaby,” it’s explicit with the line “I know the police give you trouble, they cause trouble everywhere.” Some people cheer that every night. In Philly, people were riled up by that line. In most places, they cheer when we get to the line “But when you die and go to heaven, there’ll be no policemen there.” And I put that down to the Black Lives Matter movement and the context we’re in now, that Woody was also in.
I think it’s really important to remember that a hobo wasn’t a cultural hero like he is now, back then. He was an enemy of the state, someone to be despised. Police would stop him everywhere and beat him up everywhere, and Woody reminds us of that and it still has its power from back then.
Henry: The first night I sang “Hobo’s Lullaby” I knew there was a cheer coming before it happened. In no way could it be invisible and innocuous when it went by. It can only be heard in present context. It’s not abstract, and many songs are like that. The beauty of the folk tradition is that you put these songs back up in the air and there’s a reason they [resonate] live, and not because we’re nostalgic about them.
When you’re taking a song on it’s own and using your body to push it up into the air, you can feel when there’s a connection to it, when it is itself speaking in the present tense. So many of Woody Guthrie’s songs are shockingly relevant at this moment, hard to believe they were written so long ago. It would’ve been disheartening to the nth degree had Woody known in 1940 when he was writing “Ain’t Got No Home” that in 2016 it would be at least as relevant as it was when he was inspired to write it.
RIFT: Most people’s view of America is shaped by the one that’s given to us by the media, and, lately, that’s been a barrage of ugliness. You’re both students of American history. What did your train trip and this project teach you about America and Americans that’s getting lost? What about America still gives you hope?
Henry: The fact that there’s so much more going on than we think there is. Some people are really troubled by that; I’m actually very much affirmed by that. And when I was crawling along on a train trip with Bill, it was courtesy of him that I understood how beholden our country still is on the rail. I’m like any American who doesn’t live in the Northeastern Corridor, where passenger train travel from New York to D.C. and Boston is fairly typical. For the rest of us, it’s very elective and very rare that we would actually go on a train trip as passengers.
But it was very affirming to be reminded how rooted we are in such a completely old technology. It reminds me that there are things about our culture and our identity that are ancient and that we’re still pulling from that, even when we don’t even know we are. We’re so caught up in technological advances and what our IPhones can do, it’s really easy to forget how similar our lives really are, a few conveniences notwithstanding. We’re still thriving by our wits, and there’s still as much invention ahead of us if we care to observe it as there was in the 1800s when train travel became ubiquitous.
It’s exciting to be reminded of how primitive we are as a people. We have offered some really great things to the world. We’re a brutal and heartless nation in many ways, but on the other hand, there’s been so much grace and eminence. I think so much about Louis Armstrong in the late ‘20s and about Duke Ellington in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s as two examples. With all the brutalities they faced, they answered it with beauty, and I am so… It grabs my heart even to say that to you now out loud. I feel my gratitude, I feel my pride.
That’s where I feel my pride as an American. As messy as this enterprise has been, as selfish and as brutal as it has been, we’ve also as a people shown incredible grace, and that’s part of the American character that I’m really proud of and I was reawakened to it in real time when I was traveling with Bill.
Bragg: We had a different perspective of America than I’ve ever had before because a train has to slow down when it goes through cities and towns and we were riding through people’s backyards, looking into the windows of their houses, which you don’t get when you’re taking the freeway. So I’ve never seen that, and there was obvious great poverty and inequality that you could see on the ground.
RIFT: Billy, the xenophobia and racism fueling the Brexit vote in England mirrors Trump’s rise in America. The Brexit vote was just a couple months ago. What can America learn from England?
Bragg: If Trump wins, it will empower every single racist asshole in the country. Not everybody who votes for Donald Trump is a racist, but every racist will vote for Donald Trump. Since Brexit went down, racial attacks have gone up in my country, and language is being used on the streets I haven’t heard since the ‘70s. People are calling people ‘p-a-k-i,’ and I haven’t heard that since the days of skinheads and the National Front. All of a sudden, it’s a hate-filled country, and that’s what’s at stake. I’ve been making that explicit from the stage in America, because with Brexit… you’re standing on the brink of something terrible. We’ve already jumped off that ledge, and we’re paying for it now. Things have gotten really nasty, and that’s what you’re in store for if Trump wins.
It concerns me that people will vote for Trump because they don’t like Hillary, because she’s not the change candidate. It also concerns me that people on the left or progressives keep telling me not to worry, that Trump won’t be elected because he’s such an asshole. Well, that’s what we thought about Brexit, buddy. We thought we would win. We couldn’t believe our country would vote to trash our reputation in such a way. The pound is now 1.24 on the dollar, the lowest since I’ve come to America. We thought nobody would be so stupid enough to vote for that, and we woke up in the morning and we [were wrong]. So please, don’t be complacent. You’ve got to lean in on this and make it happen.
RIFT: Part of your train travel came along the U.S.-Mexican border where Trump wants to build a wall. Joe what was that like, in terms of the manmade “us and them” experience that divides us?
Henry: We had recorded and we were hustling back to our train that was leaving at 1:30 from El Paso, the last stretch to Los Angeles to Tucson. And as the train was leaving the station, I was standing in between cars, so I had the [window] facing West, as the train started moving. And on the right side of the train I could see suburban El Paso, just like I’d imagined it—four by fours, and above-ground swimming pools, and houses, and I looked to my right to the South and was pretty stunned to recognize that Juarez was no farther away from me than was suburban El Paso, but it looked like it existed in a completely separate century. It looked like it was the mid-1800s, from what I could see.
And I could see down the hill, a [border patrolman] who was clearly watching to see if someone jumped the fence – there’s a fence there, already, [never mind] talk about a wall – and making sure somebody didn’t put themselves in the incredibly dangerous circumstance of trying to jump into the undercarriage of the moving train. Just observing that line as the train went slowly out of El Paso: “Here’s us and here’s them and we need this border, and this spare distinction, we’ve invested ourselves in it.”
We are completely devoted to maintain this border and that says “We are only us, and you remain over there as them. We only feel our own progress if we can see your diminishment.” It’s a flawed part of our humanity, and a very real part of our American culture: “I can’t enjoy myself on top of this heap unless I know that there are others below me.” It’s part of our capitalistic culture to know that we’re only doing well when there’s people doing worse, and we’ve devoted ourselves to this border because of what it says. That’s what we’ve decided to be, and we make the decision anew every day, and we ratify that decision every day, and it’s sobering to realize.
RIFT: You’re both big Prince fans, and Monday will be your first trip to Minneapolis since his passing. How did his life and death affect you?
Bragg: It was shocking, really shocking, and along with Bowie – Bowie’s really big in our house – and then to have Prince be taken from us under those circumstances was shocking, really shocking. [Bragg’s wife] Juliet and I, we had to really step back a little and take it all in, and I have a very good memory of seeing him in Minneapolis [in 1988 at the Met Center for the opening of the “Lovesexy” tour].
Henry: He was a character to whom I frequently referred when I was asked about my production life, so I ended up talking about him a lot over the years. What I care about is not so much self-expression but discovery. And the moment of discovery is what I want to get on tape; I don’t want to know in advance what’s going to happen. I want to set the table and I want to hear what happens and I want to be swept away by it. But I always use Prince as an example. I think he probably went in and he knew exactly what he wanted.
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