When train No. 97 of the Southern Railway crashed into a ravine on Sept. 27, 1903, killing eleven and injuring seven others, it cemented its place in history–not as the most fatal trainwreck in America but as the one, arguably, most remembered in balladry.
“The Wreck of the Old 97” was first commercially recorded in 1923 by Virginia musicians G.B. Grayson Henry Whitter. The ballad would go on to critical acclaim thanks to the recording by singer Vernon Dalhart. His 1924 recording, coupled with his recording of “The Prisoner’s Song,” became country music’s first million-selling record, according to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
This hundred-year-old ballad has come to life once more as a reimagined audio drama podcast produced by the Appalachia Book Company—a group that started as a book club in Eastern Kentucky before transforming into a literary publishing company and then extending their storytelling medium into the audio space.
Released as “The Storied Song,” the audio drama series takes traditional Appalachian ballads and transforms them into fully produced radio plays accompanied by original sound design and live ballad performances. Episodes were recorded last year at the Appalachian Center for the Arts in Pikeville.
“Appalachian ballads are really important, they are story songs, they are one of the first cultural exports of Appalachia,” says Natalie Axton, co-founder and director of programs for the organization.
In addition to “The Wreck of the Old 97,” other ballads in the series include “Lord Bateman,” “The Farmer’s Curst Wife” and “Tom Dula.”
The project has been in the works for a few years now and initially started with a focus solely on Appalachian murder ballads, of which “Tom Dula” is one such example.
Murder ballads typically involve the killing of a woman usually at the hands of a man, and the violence often comes about because of an unwanted pregnancy. Murder ballads constitute an entire subgenre of balladry, but so, too, do railroad disaster ballads.
Railroad disaster ballads likewise follow a similar pattern: dramatic phrases like “his whistle began to scream,” setting the scene for listeners to show them when and where the action would occur, “They gave him his orders down at Monroe, Virginia…It’s a mighty rough road from Lynchburg to Danville,” and a hero to bring it all together.
In her book, “Scalded to Death by the Steam: Authentic stories about railroad disasters and the ballads that were written about them,” author Katie Letcher Lyle argues that these ballads focus on the stories of “brave engineers,” stories that are symbolic of heroism in some manner.
“Brave, young, and true, the sung-about engineer certainly qualifies as a prototypical American epic hero. He was in the forefront of industrialism, running his machine that ran the world,” Lyle writes.
Joseph Broady, the engineer of No. 97, would then be the “hero” of this ballad. Broady was running behind schedule that day, and was told to make up the lost time; lost time meant docked pay. As he approached a curve leading to a railroad trestle near Danville, Virginia, he couldn’t lower the speed, causing the train to derail and crash into a ravine.
But is Broady a hero in “The Wreck of the Old 97”? That’s what playwright Ann Gillespie, who wrote the radio drama portion for the ballad on “The Storied Song,” sought to address.
What does it mean to be remembered and what do we owe the people in these songs? These are the motivating questions behind Gillespie’s radio play titled “The Nightmare of the Old 97.”
And there are a few different versions of Broady that are remembered. Gillespie mentions when writing the radio drama how she came across a number of versions of “The Wreck of the Old 97.”
For example, Dalhart’s popular version of the ballad substitutes “Steve” for “Pete” and more than one version of the ballad claims that Broady had a wife when he did not.
And as Lyle writes in “Scalded to Death,” it’s speculated that Broady was nicknamed “Steve” after Steve Brodie, a daredevil from New York City who claims to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886 and survived. This supposed nickname gives credence to the idea that Broady was dangerously driving the train.
The worst moment in Broady’s life has been memorialized in song for over a century now, but little is known about the man himself. In Gillespie’s radio play, Broady has a conversation in the afterlife with an unnamed singer who helps him recount the leadup to the fatal crash and makes sense of the legacy he’s unknowingly left behind.
What is known is that Broady attempted to slow the train before turning the curve but was unsuccessful.
“I don’t know if it’s tragedy, I don’t know if it’s redemption, I don’t know if it’s irony, but after he’s gone, he achieves what he sets out to do, which is to be viewed heroically…and to be remembered,” Gillespie said.
Whether or not it’s how Broady would wish to be remembered, or if it’s a fair legacy, is ultimately left to the listener.
