💾 Archived View for ecs.d2evs.net › posts › 2024-03-28-charlie.gmi captured on 2024-05-12 at 14:50:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

the story of a man named charlie

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")

the version from a paper linked below going over the song's history ("dreier", the first author of the paper)

and finally, the reason i started writing this post, an informational poster thingy from the mbta i found in Boston in Transit (2023) ("transit")

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:

we know from Dreier that kingston's recording is descended from holt's, which mostly matches the lyrical changes. kingston makes a few changes to the holt lyrics, but the only place where those changes match the other recordings is "charlie"/"poor charlie". i'm not particularly sure what to make of this - it could be that the random walk between holt and kingston happened to invert the random walk from the original to holt, or it could be that they both got it from some intermediate source with all the changes holt has except for dropping "poor"
holt and kingston are markedly different from the rest of the versions, their changes don't overlap except for "off the train" turning into "off that train", which happens everywhere except for the original and the transit version
dreier and steiner seem to be more closely related, with dreier likely closer to the original. all the locations where dreier disagrees with the consensus, it agrees with steiner. the exception is one line in the second verse which both dreier and steiner change, but which they replace with different lines
original and transit also seem to be closely related, with a similar lack of changes that overlap exclusively with other versions

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

Dreier's paper

Berman's website