This Train

Lyrics

The lyrics below are preserved exactly as documented in early twentieth-century primary sources. Dialect, spelling, and phrasing reflect the living tradition of the communities who created and sang these songs. Standardizing the language would erase the historical record. See our editorial standards for more.

Historical Context

"This Train" — widely known as "This Train Is Bound for Glory" — is a spiritual that belongs to the tradition's large family of railroad songs, in which the train of salvation carries the faithful toward a heavenly destination. It was carried in the oral tradition and documented in the folk-song collecting of the early twentieth century, including the work of John and Alan Lomax, and it appears among the spirituals anthologized in this period. It was first recorded in the 1920s and became a signature piece for the pioneering gospel singer-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

The railroad entered the spirituals as the rail network spread across the nineteenth-century South, and its imagery overlapped with the vocabulary of the Underground Railroad — "conductors," "stations," "passengers" — so that the gospel train carried, for many, a double freight of heavenly and earthly deliverance.

Cultural Significance

Where some gospel-train songs emphasize the train's radical inclusiveness — "there's room for many a more" — "This Train" emphasizes its standards. The train is "bound for glory" and "don't carry nothing but the righteous and the holy"; it refuses gamblers, liars, hypocrites, and "midnight ramblers." The song draws a sharp moral line: the destination is holy, and so the passenger list is exacting.

This is not a contradiction of the tradition's generosity but its complement. The welcome is universal, but it is a welcome to transformation; the train is open to all who will live as "the righteous and the holy," and closed to those who will not change. For a community that policed its own moral boundaries through song — warning against the hypocrite, the gambler, the backslider — "This Train" was both an invitation and a standard.

The song's driving, propulsive rhythm, built for the momentum of a train, made it irresistible, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe's electrified recordings carried it from the sanctuary toward the rhythm and blues and rock and roll it helped to birth.

Scholarly Notes

The Lomaxes' field recordings and publications documented "This Train" and its many variants, preserving the fluidity of its verses — the roll call of excluded sinners shifts from version to version, a hallmark of songs sustained in oral tradition.

James Weldon Johnson and other anthologists placed the railroad songs within the tradition's embrace of contemporary imagery, evidence that the spirituals were living and evolving rather than fixed.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe's recordings of "This Train," beginning in the late 1930s, are landmarks in the history of American music, and her guitar-driven gospel is widely recognized as a direct ancestor of rock and roll — one more instance of the spiritual tradition's generative power.