Narration #4 (Same Train, A Different Time) - Merle Haggard

The hobo is a reocurring subject in the Jimmie Rodgers songs

Hoboing was an accepted form of travel for the migrant worker

Or for the unemployed who simply wanted a change of weather

And during the period of Jimmie’s greatest popularity

You could set your watch by the highbawl of any train

Hoboing was an inexpensive almost sure way of getting from one place to

another and during the peak of the depression it was not unusual to see

Oh half a hundred bo’s jump from a train just as it came into the outskirts

of a city.

They’d jump off a soon as they could so as to ditch the trainbulls

of the oncoming yard.

But many quite respectable men find it convenient to

hop trains also and many of them died identified only as a railroad bum

And I would imagine that hobo Bill was one of them…