Casey Jones

Casey Jones

In addition to playing many "traditional" and "old-timey" songs, the Grateful Dead also wrote a number originals that were either based on true events or these traditional folk tales. A few of the songs in this category that comes to mind are "Dupree's Diamond Blues", "Stagger Lee", or the song were looking at here, "Casey Jones".

Born John Luther Jones in Missouri in 1863 and moving with his family as a boy to Cayce, Kentucky (the town from which he got his nickname), Casey Jones is an American folk hero who was an engineer during the heyday of the American railroad. Jones was an engineer on the Illinois Central line, and had a trademark way of blowing the train's while, giving rise to the phrase "Casey Moan". He is best known for his courage, sacrificing his life by keeping one hand on the brake to slow the train and one hand on the whistle to warn others who might be near the train. He died in 1900 in Vaughan, Mississippi, when he collided with another train. Jones was immortalized in American folklore with the release of Wallace Saunders's song "The Ballad of Casey Jones".

Robert Hunter's version of "Casey Jones" tell the story of a locomotive engineer who is driving his train "high on cocaine" and dies in a collision with another train after losing track of his speed (note the double entendre). This Hunter/Garcia penned Grateful Dead classic first appeared on the album Workingman's Dead in 1970, but it was performed live fifty or more times before that.

"Casey Jones" was first performed on June 20, 1969, at the Fillmore East in New York. It remained in the repertoire fairly consistently through 1984, then was dropped until June 1992, when it reappeared for four more performances.

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