April 14th is Ruination Day.
The Gods preserve us from this April 14th, Ruination Day. As remembered by a coupla precocious Nashville archivists: the sexy banjo-alto vocalist and songstress Gillian Welch and her preposition-and-article-filling-in henchman David Rawlings.
Ruination Day.
In Gillian’s timely–or prophetic–2001 release “Time (the Revelator)”, the kids devote not one, but two tracks to the 14th of April. In doing so, they also pay homage to both Leadbelly, but also to the Saint of Speedfreaks, Casey Jones.
Casey, of course, was the train engineer who, on April 30 1900 remained onboard a 80 mph speeding train with one hand on the brake and the other on the whistle while the passengers jumped to escape an oncoming collision. It was a tremendous crash, and save Casey, all survived.
Leadbelly wrote a ballad to the Wreck of the Titanic, which sank on Ruination Day in 1912.
Also on Ruination Day in 1935 Oklahoma experienced “Black Sunday”, the begin of the Dustbowl proper. The nation’s heartland’s crops suffocated, whithered, and died, leading to famine and desperate mass migration westward. A favorite topic of Woody Guthrie, yet a lesson never truly learned back home.
Also on Ruination Day in 1865, as the Great War that nearly tore this nation asunder slowly ebbed, the Emancipator, gentle, lankey, honest President Abe Lincoln was killed at Ford’s Theater by an actor.
Ruination Day.
Oh. Here is the lyric:
When the iceberg hit,
Oh they must have known,
God moves on the water
Like Casey Jones.
So I walked downtown
On my telephone,
And took a lazy turn
Through the redeye zone.
It was a five-band bill,
A two-dollar show.
I saw the van out in front
From Idaho,
And the girl passed out
In the backseat trash.
There were no way they'd make
Even a half a tank of gas.
They looked sick and stoned
And strangely dressed.
No one showed
From the local press.
But I watched them walk
Through the bottom land,
And I wished that I played
In a rock & roll band.
Hey, hey,
It was the fourteenth day of April.
Well they closed it down,
With the sails in rags.
And I swept up the fags
And the local mags.
I threw the plastic cups
In the plastic bags,
And the cooks cleaned the kitchen
With the staggers and the jags.
Ruination day,
And the sky was red.
I went back to work,
And back to bed.
And the iceberg broke,
And the Okies fled,
And the Great Emancipator
Took a bullet in the back of the head...
Ruination Day.
God moves underwater, Casey Jones.