Jazz lovers worldwide know well the passion that Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong had for trains, especially for the elegant Pullman cars that toted them to gigs across the country. Within the velvet-appointed sleeping carriages, African American porters shined the musicians’ shoes, nursed their hangovers, clipped their hair and served them mint juleps and Welsh rarebit — the same service afforded wealthy white passengers.
In return, the maestros composed their now famous songs of homage to trains. There’s Duke’s throbbing “Happy Go Lucky Local,” the Count’s bow to the “Super Chief” and Satchmo’s romantic rendering of “Mail Train Blues.” But few fans appreciated the real reason these jazz legends worshiped not just the railroad generally, but George Pullman’s sleeper car: It saved them from the threat of terrifying violence.
In that Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Just getting out of an automobile or bus to look for a meal and a bed could prove perilous in unfamiliar cities below the Mason-Dixon line. Wrong choices sometimes led to berating, beating or worse, with racial violence reaching new peaks in the early 1900s. Even the music makers’ fame couldn’t fully protect them. Only on the Pullman cars, where they were served by fellow African Americans, could they truly relax while on the road.
“To avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a 70-foot baggage car,” Ellington wrote in his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress.” “Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them.”
The Count Basie Orchestra did, too. Traveling in stylish Pullmans “was my piece of cake,” Basie recalled in his 1985 autobiography, “Good Morning Blues.” “Lots of times, instead of me getting into my bed, I used to sit and look out the window most of the night as we rambled from one place to another. That was music to me.”
That the Pullman porters loved these jazzmen was a bonus, and the musicians grew to reciprocate that affection, playing their pianos, clarinets and trumpets late into the night in the closed capsule of the club car. The porters saw it as a quiet nod to them each time the Basie band queued up railroad-friendly tunes like “Midnight Freight,” “9:20 Special” and “Night Train.” Or when Armstrong played “Farewell to Storyville,” “Hobo You Can’t Ride This Train” and “Railroad Blues,” and the Ellington orchestra set toes tapping with “Choo-Choo,” “The Old Circus Train Turnaround Blues” or “Daybreak Express,” the last of which blends blaring saxophones and a singular trumpet to make listeners feel, as well as hear, the train hurtling down the tracks.
(Ellington’s signature song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” was about the subway, not the railroad, and was composed by his protégé, Billy Strayhorn, not Duke.)
Armstrong said the greeting he got from the trainmen when he was leaving New Orleans for Chicago made him cherish them forever.
“All the Pullman porters and waiters recognized me because they had seen me playing on the tailgate wagons to advertise dances, or ‘balls’ as we used to call them. They all hollered at me saying, ‘Where you goin’, ‘Dipper?’,” Armstrong wrote in “Satchmo,” his second memoir.
He also knew that on return trips to his native Louisiana, unless he was renting his own carriages, he, like other African American people, would likely be banished to what he called the “James Crow cars.” These were the train compartments that were just behind the coal-stoked engine, with noxious fumes, limited seating, and no heaters, wash basins, flush toilets, water coolers, dining options or even a cushion to rest upon.
By contrast, arriving by Pullman — especially when the bands had prearranged to have their coaches park on a sidetrack during their full stay — meant a safe haven to return to after and even between performances. There’d be a warm meal waiting, along with a freshly laundered bed, friendly Black faces eager for the lowdown on that night’s activities and, when the bandsman was accompanied by a lady, the same discretion porters showed the fussy Brahmins of Boston and the fierce Goliaths of Wall Street during their lonely nights crossing the continent.
“On arrival in a city, the cars were parked on a convenient track, and connections were made for water, steam, sanitation and ice. This was our home away from home,” Ellington recalled in “Music is My Mistress.”
“Many observers would say, ‘Why, that’s the way the President travels!’ It automatically gained us respect,” he continued, “and removed the threat and anticipation of trouble.”
To appreciate these jazzmen’s embrace of the Pullman experience, consider what the Armstrong band endured during a private bus tour through the South in 1931. According to a contemporaneous account in the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal, Armstrong and his mates refused the bus company’s reasonable request to change vehicles so theirs could be repaired, and “exhibited” six pistols to make their point, at which time the police carted them to jail. But the actual problem was twofold — the station master had decided the band’s shiny new Greyhound was “too nice” for the musicians, and that the wife of the band’s white manager was riding with them, violating more Southern mores.
“You’re in Memphis now,” one arresting officer said, “and we need some cotton-pickers.” A second, pointing to the Black musician sitting with the white woman, egged on his partner: “Why don’t you shoot him in the leg?” After everyone was booked, a third constable warned, “You ain’t gonna come down to Memphis and try to run Memphis — we’ll kill all you.”
So many were their challenges that, in later years, the bandleaders referred to themselves as the first Freedom Riders, a reference to the Black and white activists who, in 1961, protested the segregation of interstate buses by riding side-by-side through the separate and unjust South, with some nearly dying for their troubles.
By that time World War II had yielded to the Cold War, and big bands switched mostly to air travel for domestic flights and a combination of air and sea for international trips.
But these musical legends held onto their emotional bonds to the railroad. It evoked a warm nostalgia for their early days on the road, and always tied them to the history of Black freedom and locomotion. Trains figured in African-American spirituals, fueled the Great Migration and, in an earlier time, inspired enslaved peoples to dream of escaping north.
Duke would sit next to the window in his private sleeper in what appeared to be a trance, according to a 1944 profile in The New Yorker. He would stare for hours at telephone poles, listening to the metallic rhythm of the wheels, delighting as “the firemen play blues on the engine whistle — big, smeary things like a goddamn woman singing in the night.” All of which, he added, made him “a train freak,” as he demonstrated in his 1950 recording of “Build That Railroad:” “Drive that spike boy / And sing that song / Build that road babe / A thousand miles long …”
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