Gone 500 miles when the day is done

On a cold April Monday morning in 1970, Steve Goodman sat on a southbound Illinois Central train, gazing out the window. Beside him sat his young wife, Nancy. They were taking a day trip to visit Nancy’s grandmother, who was already in her 90’s, so that the old lady could meet the young man that her granddaughter had married.

As Nancy napped, Steve pulled out a notepad and started jotting down images that he saw from his window seat.

At the end of 35 minutes, the young man had penned a song that has come to be hailed as “the greatest train song ever written.” The song—and the train they were riding—were called “The City of New Orleans.”

That moment would mark the birth of a great musical career—ironic, because it was a birth steeped in the certainty of death.

As the young couple rolled toward Mattoon, they knew that the old grandmother would not have long to live. More to the point, they also knew that she might very well outlive 21-year-old Steve, for he had been diagnosed with leukemia only 18 months before. Experimental treatments to postpone death from the fatal disease were just in their infancy, so the young musician’s outlook was bleak. He had already outlasted the 6-month prognosis for his death and was rapidly approaching the 3-year limit that was listed as his best hope.

Small wonder, then, that Steve chose to write about “the train they call The City of New Orleans,” for it, too, was nearing the end of a death sentence: It was scheduled to be removed from the Illinois Central schedule in a matter of months. Rail service all over the nation was withering, fading into oblivion that Steve Goodman took to heart.

Only three years earlier, as a college student at U of I, he had ridden that train on a joyous weekend trip to New Orleans. But that was a different time, a time when he believed that he—and the train—would live forever.

By the time they returned to Chicago later that day, Steve had written two verses of the song, and he played it for some friends to see what they thought of it. Fred Holstein, the resident mentor at The Earl of Old Town, immediately declared it “an American folk-song classic.”

But a fellow musician, Richard Wedler, thought that the song was unfinished. “That’s cool,” he said, “but you can do better than that.” He noted that the two verses simply looked out the window. “What happened on the train?” he asked.

Ten minutes later, Steve had written the middle verse, a verse so rich in sensory imagery that it evokes the lyrical magic of great American writers such as John Steinbeck and Edgar Lee Masters.

He played the song willingly for anybody who would listen, and several well-known Chicago musicians, like Holstein and Bonny Kolak, immediately worked it into their set lists. Visitors to the Earl of Old Town, like Gordon Lightfoot and Roger Ebert, were mesmerized by the song and praised it highly.

The owner of the club, Earl Pionke, encouraged Steve to have the song copyrighted immediately, and before long its appeal spread wider and wider, to artists such as Carly Simon, Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, and Paul Anka.

But nobody could find a recording label willing to produce it. Finally Arlo Guthrie agreed to be the first to record it on a major label. He had just lost his father, folk singer Woody Guthrie, less than three years earlier, and the plaintive imagery captured Arlo’s imagination, for the odds were fifty-fifty that he, too, had inherited his father’s disease.

However, Guthrie made the mistake of introducing Steve Goodman to John Denver, who ironically came near to killing the song altogether.

Denver also wanted to record the song (after promising Arlo Guthrie that he would wait until Guthrie had recorded it first), but Denver didn’t feel that the lyrics were quite “commercial” enough. He asked Goodman if he would mind if he tinkered with the lyrics a bit.

Steve, anxious to see the song succeed so that it might earn royalties for his soon-to-be-widowed wife, agreed. Together, they rewrote the last verse in a version that was so watered-down as to be sappy and melodramatic. Still, Goodman desperately agreed to the changes, for Denver was a money-making star.

Later, though, Denver went even further with his changes to the lyrics and chord structure, and then he broke his promise to Arlo Guthrie by including the recording on his new album, which would come out before Guthrie’s would.

To add insult to injury, Denver listed the song as “written by Steve Goodman and John Denver.”

Steve Goodman was devastated. Would this new version forever become the sappy water-mark for the poignant song that he had written? If he himself ever sang his own original version again, would he be seen as a word-changing thief? Worse, would his royalties be cut in half?

Fortunately, the new Denver album was a bust, and few people ever heard the new version of the song. Denver himself admitted that the changes were not good ones, and he and Goodman later made up.

Arlo Guthrie went on to record the song in 1972, with full credit going to Steve Goodman, and “The City of New Orleans” did indeed become an American folk-song classic.

Buoyed by his new fame and fortune, and bolstered by new medical techniques, Steve Goodman lived another 12 years, before dying in 1984 at age 36. He wrote many other songs that became folk classics, but none had the power or poignancy as the one he scribbled on a notepad that cold April Monday morning as he rode a dying train toward death.

Primary source: Steve Goodman, facing the music by Clay Eals, ECW Press, 2007

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