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there's this song, right, it's called "M.T.A." (or charlie on the mta, depending on who you ask), and i think i'm getting a bit obsessed
it was a campaign song for a mayoral candidate in boston in the late '40s, written by some local folk musicians, and it's become part of the mbta's¹ lore. our fare cards are named after the protagonist of the song, charlie, who gets stuck on the t because he doesn't have a nickel for a then-recently-instituted exit fare that the mayoral candidate was opposing
¹ the greater boston public transit system, colloquially known as the t
anyways, so the really cool thing is that, in addition to performing the song live, the folk artists also did a recording of the song (along with a few other songs that didn't end up getting a life of their own), and that recording survives to this day
the original recording of M.T.A.
this is especially neat cause it allows us to trace various small mutations to the lyrics starting from a relatively canonical baseline, with a couple caveats. first and most obviously, the recording is just straight-up missing a verse. nobody knows why, but it's definitively acknowledged that that verse exists, and we know what it is from various other accounts. secondly, and a bit more subtly: even to the extent that canonicality is a reasonable thing to assign to the lyrics of a folk song, i'm not fully convinced that i can trust the version they happened to record to match the version everything else is descended from
with that in mind, i uh. i have somewhere between 6 and 8 different versions of the lyrics on hand. we'll go in chronological order
the original recording from 1949 ("original")
the recording done by Will Holt. there're two different versions, both are described ("holt")
the recording done by the kingston trio ("kingston")
the recording done by Jackie Steiner, one of the original composers ("steiner")
Jackie Steiner also lead a workshop sorta thing at GGG in 2009, and a recording of it is available online. she lead a sing-through of the song, and the version she sang there is equivalent to her other recording except for potentially being "through" rather than "to" in "as his train rolled on to/through greater boston", as well as having an additional french verse/chorus which i can't transcribe cause i don't french
here's a detailed description of each of the differences between all six
there's a few conclusions we can try to draw from this:
another note: i suspect that "car" in the "greater boston" verse was likely the original, despite 5 of the 6 versions using "train" instead. the fare increase described in the song was along the streetcar routes, and jp (where charlie changed for in the second verse) was (and still is) exclusively served by streetcars and buses, rather than rapid transit trains
i'm kinda curious where the mbta got their lyrics, since they seem like they might even be a bit more canonical than the original recording, but i wasn't able to track down the citation from Boston in Transit. if anyone decides to dig a bit further down this rabbit hole and ends up finding something, please let me know!
oh, and btw, i barely even touched on the rest of the history of this song. there's a surprising amount of stuff to it, i highly recommend Dreier's paper along with the rest of Arnold Berman's website, it's where i got most of my information for this exploration