Grateful Dead

Casey Jones supplementary notes

By Jesse Jarnow

Casey Jones was a very real train engineer who died in a workplace accident late in the night of April 30, 1900, early May 1st. He was not high on cocaine. The first of many songs about him was written almost instantly, by one of his co-workers, though none would be recorded for another two decades. It was a true folk song.

A detailed history of the real-life Casey Jones and subsequent songs about him. David Dodd’s Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics site (and book) looks at Robert Hunter’s adaptation. Casey Jones’s house in Jackson, Tennessee--just off I-40 between Memphis and Nashville--is now a museum.

Bob Egan and his team of collaborators at the incredible site PopSpotsNYC figured out the exact location of the Workingman’s Dead cover photo, taken in Hunter’s Point, in South San Francisco. Several of Mouse’s original drafts for the cover can be seen online. The Workingmole’s Dead version, featuring a giant star-nosed mole looming in the background, is viewable on PopSpotsNYC. Perhaps the earliest conception was auctioned by Bonhams in 2015, from when the album was still called The Workingman’s Dead--sourced from what Mouse labeled the maquette--was either abandoned midway through or features an intentional trompe l’oeil effect.