On the “Chattanooga Choo Choo”

Screenshot from Sun Valley Serenade (1941), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. I was a bop kid from the start. When Eric Carmen, the talented lead singer of the Raspberries, wrote “I’m a rocker, I’m a roller / I’ve been a-boogieing since I ditched the stroller,” he might have been talking about me. I can clearly remember my first record, a seventy-eight rpm. It was Elvis singing “Don’t Be Cruel.” (B-side was “Hound Dog.”) Later I graduated to forty-fives and bought Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” for seventy-eight cents. (B-side: “Around and Around.”) My mother—not exactly racist but very much a woman of her time—asked me if Mr. Berry was white. Fearing my precious record might be taken away (I was ten), I assured her he was. Just lately, though, I have become fascinated by the so-called big bands on the SiriusXM station called “40s Junction.” I guess this sort of music is called, for want of a better word, jazz, but it’s totally unlike Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, or Sonny Rollins. My collaborator on three books, Peter Straub, was a total jazz freak, and I did him the courtesy of listening, but the music always made me feel like I had a low-grade case of the flu. Glenn Miller in Sun Valley Serenade (1941), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. But big band tunes aren’t the jazz of Charlie “Bird” Parker, and they’re not rock and roll. Jazz is a custom coupe. Rock is a chopped-and-channeled hot rod. Big band music is a lush 1941 Cadillac, rolling along on custom-built shock absorbers to give the smoothest ride possible. Some big band tunes—I’m thinking of the Benny Goodman classic “Sing, Sing, Sing”—are like precursors to rock and roll. This is a bit off subject, but there are black-and-white videos of guys and dolls dressed in evening clothes bopping up and down to the “Sing, Sing, Sing” beat as if they are on pogo sticks. It’s hilarious, but they’re having a terrific time, so if the video makes you laugh, you lose. Still, the Goodman combine fits what I’m talking about. It was an orchestra, not a rock and roll band like the Beatles, the Kinks, or the Who. What I mostly want to talk about is the Glenn Miller band—suit-and-tie-wearing players swinging their hips, their instruments shining, hair gleaming with oil, cheeks as smooth as the Gerber baby’s bottom, using their mutes in unison (sometimes wearing them on their heads like derbies)—and the queer combination of sophistication and naivete in lyrics sung by cool cats and smooth kitties. In particular I want to drill down on a song called “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” as it appears in a film called Sun Valley Serenade, released in 1941. The bandleader, who first appears with his trombone in the crook of his elbow (crazy, man, crazy), is Glenn Miller, three years before his death in December of 1944 (his body and the plane in which he was riding were never found). There are nineteen musicians in Sun Valley Serenade, plus the vocalists the Modernaires and the saxophonist Gordon Lee “Tex” Beneke. Tex Beneke! Is that the coolest name ever, or what? The defense rests. And in Serenade he is wearing a gimme cap with the brim turned up—and whistling! Yes! So fine! The music is smooth as cream, and the drummer Maurice Purtill keeps it jive. But it’s the lyrics I really want to buzz about, cuz. There is simply nothing like them in the rock and roll era. There’s poetry, and there’s doggerel. The latter perfectly describes most lyrics of the early rock and roll era, where arms inevitably rhymes with charms and baby is followed by don’t mean maybe. This is miles from Wallace Stevens, Adrienne Rich, or Edgar Allan Poe. Even the lyrics of sophisticated pop writers (I’m thinking of Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen) have a tendency to look dead on the page. That is probably also the case with “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” although these lyrics fall in a gray area that’s neither poetry nor doggerel. They charm with rhymes that delight both the heart and mind, especially if you have a sense of humor. The very name of the song is alliterative, but that alliteration is combined with the childish word for “passenger train.” The combo is, as I say, both sophisticated and naïve. It’s daddy-cool. I tried to write both poetry and songs in college. My goal as a poet was to write something, maybe just one thing, as good as William Carlos Williams or Ed Dorn. My goal as a songwriter was to write something as good as Leonard Cohen. Most of the songs I wrote sounded like someone else’s. Those few that didn’t were pretentious and humorless. I managed what Al Kooper calls “that quantum leap to palatability” with a few poems, and I continue writing verse—but I know it never was or will be my thing. Because, dig this, what I was never able to capture, in song or poetry, is anything close to the opening of “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” where the band picks up speed like a train going down the tracks and there’s a thrown-off—but oh-so-hip—rhyme of version and Tennessee excursion. Version is two syllables; excursion is three, and the two of them together feels like doing a light two-step up to a porch where you’ll relax in your white flannels and have a mint julep. The whole song has that feel. It’s not nostalgia but time travel. There was never a track 29 in Pennsylvania Station; the track numbers went up only to 21. Similarly, the Birmingham Special, later known as the Chattanooga Choo Choo, did go through eastern Virginia, but never touched North Carolina. But as we know, there is—must be—such a thing as poetic license. Never mind geography; nothing could be better than the triple rhyme of “Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer / than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina.” Not only is it delightful to the ear, it’s grammatical. Many other songs on “40s Junction” have that same neither-fish-nor-fowl smooth laid-back coolness; “Chattanooga” isn’t even my favorite. That would be “Sing, Sing, Sing,” with its blazing clarinet riffs and those great Krupa drum solos. Others with that smooth Cadillac ride include “One O’Clock Jump” (Count Basie), “Take the ‘A’ Train” (Duke Ellington), and the totally goofy but ultimately hip “Milkman, Keep Those Bottles Quiet” (Georgia Gibbs). Yet nothing sums up the feeling I’m talking about better than “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” “You leave the Pennsylvania Station ’bout a quarter to four / Read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore.” Four and Baltimore, how’s that for a knocked-out crazy wacka-flacka? Get your head around it, cuz! Of course, the Birmingham Special left at 12:30 P.M., but … what’d I say? Poetic license. Stephen King is the author of more than seventy books, all international bestsellers. On October 6, his collaboration with the late Peter Straub, Other Worlds Than These, will be published by Scribner. Last / Next Article Share