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HISTORICAL NOTES: The Legacy of a Legend

2 minute read
TIME

Mrs. Casey sat on her bed a-sighin’, Just received a message that poor Casey

was dyin’, Said, “Go to bed, children, and hush

your cry’n’, ‘Cause you got another papa on the

Salt Lake Line.”

Engineer John Luther (“Casey”) Jones highballed the Illinois Central’s Cannonball No. 1 out of Memphis an hour and 35 minutes late. His throttle hand urged the Cannonball south along Mississippi’s Big Black River at 75 m.p.h. while Casey exulted in its power. “Sim,” he shouted to his fireman, “the old lady’s got her high-heeled slippers on tonight.” Minutes later he saw the freight cars parked on the track ahead. “Jump, Sim,” cried Casey, “and save yourself.” Fireman Simeon Webb jumped and lived. But Casey Jones, on the night of April 30, 1900, roared on to death—and became a legend.

That legend was a legacy of bitterness to Janie Jones, Casey’s wife, mother of his daughter and two sons. For the next 58 years she lived with The Ballad of Casey Jones—and with the cruel lines added to a Negro engine wiper’s mournful song by a Tin Pan Alley hack. “The Casey Jones song has haunted my whole life since the beginning of the century,” she once said. Memphis railroaders were known to fight with strangers who sang the slanderous lines. For a while, the ballad was banned in Jackson, Tenn., where Janie Jones lived out the long, lean years. With the help of a ghost writer, she tried to clear herself in a new version of the song: “My Casey, Husband Casey, who meant the world to me.”

It was no use. Thousands who never knew that Casey Jones had actually existed still sang of him—and of the other papa on the Salt Lake Line. And last week, impoverished and bitter, Janie Jones, 92, died in Jackson. She had never remarried.

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