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

Narration #4 (Same Train, A Different Time)

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…