WHY is everything last minute when getting ready to leave? Oh yeah, guess I COULD have saved myself MANY hours if I HAD NOT started this humongous Playlist thing with all these train songs. (g) Ain’t finished yet.
Took a while to search the iTunes Store online for train-related songs. Stopped listing them at 200. Merely added a few more from the 200-to-600 list. NOT that I selected 200 from the list. Just that I listed the first 200 I found at the iTunes Store, then skimmed through the next 400. The purpose was to highlight the ones I want. One star for “Would be nice.” Two stars for “Want this.” Three stars for “Need this.” And four stars for “Must have.”
Currently there are 40 with one star (Would be nice) and that was after some heart wrenching pruning.
No Railroad Bill , by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
No Wreck of the Old ’97, by Johnny Cash.
No Hobo Bill’s Last Ride, by Hank Snow.
Tell me it ain’t so.
Sadly, it is. And you should see some of the more familiar names on the one-star list. I don’t want to mention any others, as none of these will make it for obvious financial reasons. (sigh)
There are 23 with two stars (Want this) and these were supposed to automatically make it. (To make it, they, like all the songs on this particular list, have to be downloaded from the iTunes Store, usually for .99 cents each. So you can see why it may only be a few, if any, of these two-star songs that do make it.)
There are about 15 with three stars (Need this) and four with four stars (Must have). In fact one of the four-star songs is Gordon Lightfoot’s Canadian Railroad Trilogy, which I already have on CD and have imported it to my iTunes Library. So, as Vic Rauter would say, make that only three four-star songs: Chatanooga Choo Choo by Glenn Miller and his Orchestra; On The Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe, by Johnny Mercer and Mule Train, by Frankie Lane.
Can anyone argue with these three songs?
I also just realized I already have on CD Folsom Prison Blues by Johnny Cash. (I also have his Blue Train, which I don’t recall seeing on the iTunes Store list. So I’m adding it for free.) So that means only 14 three-star songs and three four-star songs (See how confusing it can get?) so maybe a two-star song like Midnight Special by CCR or It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry, by Bob Dylan or Trans Europe Express by my favourite German band, Kraftwerk, might make it after all. Maybe even all three.
I still have a little bit of credit left on the $50 iTunes credit card Travis gave me almost two years ago. (Took me a while to get up the nerve to use it, though it proved sooo easy.) And I had Mariette pick up a new one ($25) today while she was out shopping.
(I’ve learned that buying these special cards, which are only good at the iTunes Store site, pays off by letting me download a song or two I like instead of buying a whole album, either online, or as a CD. It’s how I got to choose which of Arlo Guthrie’s versions of City of New Orleans I wanted to download/buy a week or so ago.)
So the shopping list has been compiled and I’ll have to see what ends up being bought/downloaded when the crunch comes. It’s late and I still have to try to buy/download as many as I can without using up all my credit at the iTunes Store.
I’ve also gathered together on one machine the train-related songs I already had in my iTunes libraries, plus the songs I had on CD — yeah Locomotive Breath by Jethro Tull, the aforementioned Canadian Railroad Trilogy and even Rod Stewart’s rendition of Downtown Train. As happened with the latter song, and others, the iTunes Store search turned up several versions of some songs. I have to confess Tom Waits rendition of Downtown Train was very tempting. But then you see the limitations I was facing.
At the same time, I wasn’t the least bit tempted to buy the Pocket Songs Karaoke version of Train In Vain, even though I can’t find my Annie Lennox or Clash CDs, which are packed away some place. I KNOW my London Calling CD is lying around somewhere, but I’m far too tired to go look.
The search at the iTunes Store site for train songs didn’t even turn up Train In Vain by the Clash, or Lennox or even Dwight Yoakum’s version, for that matter. These three, plus Toxic Sloth, and a number of other names, cropped up when I just did a search by song title.
Oh well, it’s far too late, and there’s too far to go this night, for me to worry now about all that.
In fact I’d better get busy buying/downloading from the iTunes store so I can put all my selected train-related songs on my iPod with one special playlist.
I WILL publish complete lists when I get back from my train trip. And again, thanks to my dear friends who took the time to post such worthy suggestions.