Fred J. Lee

Take out about 80% of this book and it might be worth something.

John Luther "Casey" Jones, named for the town of Cayce where he lived in his teens, is among the most famous railroadmen of all time -- partly for his death on the rails and partly for his energetic life before his wreck. Folktales about him are common, and the song about him is known all over the United States and has inspired numerous parodies, from "Casey Jones the Union Scab" to a bawdy version in which Casey works his way through a hundred prostitutes (with a brief break after #98). So the world would be well served by a biography that tells the truth.

Despite the claim that this is the "true story" of Casey, it is a work of fiction. Oh, it's based on facts; author Lee even has a list of the people he talked to about Jones, many of them very important to the story. Lee himself knew one of Jones's brothers. But the result is about 20% facts and about 80% Lee -- and when we come to the vast amount of dialog, I'd guess it's 1% facts and 99% Lee. One may hope, since the dialog is awful. If I were married to someone who talked like Jones or his wife, I'd be filing for divorce on day 2.

But it gets worse. Not only does Lee not know the difference between truth and fiction, he's an extreme racist. Take this passage about Sim Webb, Jones's fireman on his final run, who was Black: "Sim Webb was a colored boy distinctly above the average of his race in intelligence, character and general ability. He had studied to become a doctor. But the lure of the railroad caused him to give up the medical profession" (p. 257). I read this to mean, "Sim Webb studied to be a physician, but bigotry forced him to take a railroad job rather than using his real talents."

Or this description of Wallace Saunders, the Black church deacon who wrote the famous song about Casey, who obviously was competent enough to make a very popular song: "Wallace Saunders was just such a Negro as the text portrays: ignorant, unlettered, extremely simple-minded."

It was extraordinarily difficult to get through this book for the occasional nugget of fact buried among the references to "darkys" and "Sugarfoots" (which is what Jones allegedly called his wife). A good biography of Jones would be a useful thing for those interested in the legend. But the first requirement for such a biography would surely be that it be written by someone who is not a bigot and who is knowledgeable enough to know what "biography" means.… (meer)