10. Kassie Jones, Parts 1 & 2

Furry Lewis (Recorded Aug. 28, 1928; released on Victor 21664);
composed by Walter E. Lewis

On April 30, 1900, John Luther "Casey" Jones, a railroad engineer already well known for obsessive punctuality, was trying to brake the passenger train he was driving when it nonetheless even more famously collided with a standing freight. He was the only fatality; his fireman lived. Numerous popular songs about this event began appearing within a few years of it, but this well-known country blues is not really one of them – being more about sex – and it is in two parts for the same reason that Waiting For Godot is – because Godot is not “nothing happening twice,” it’s about Vladimir betraying Estragon. At the end of Act II, Vladimir says, “Tell him you saw me,” instead of “saw us” as he does in Act I. In Part 1, Casey speeds his train while his wife beds a bootlegger running from the police and dreams of her sewing machine needle breaking. In Part 2, she baffles their grieving children by just drawing his pension and moving on as Casey leaves the world after entering something of a dream state, delineated in the opening verse: “Casey looked at his water, water was low / Looked at his watch, his watch was slow.”

Note: 25 secular essays about 25 songs, each one exactly 200 words long, appearing one per day during Advent (approximately).