Train Kept A-Rollin

Tiny Bradshaw (1951). Excerpt from "The 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll"

Ohio-born vocalist and bandleader Tiny Bradshaw enjoyed fairly consistent chart success while fronting various swing orchestras and R&B combos in the late 40s and 50s. Yet, his most important contribution to the evolution of rock and roll was a barely-charting 1951 jump and jive track called “Train Kept A-Rollin.”

Although Bradshaw was best known to audiences of the time for cool swingers like “Well Oh Well,” this hot blues-based boogie would become his most enduing contribution.

Based loosely on the phrasing of Cow Cow Davenport’s “Cow Cow Blues” (1928), “Train Kept A-Rollin” has a decidedly downtown feel to it.

There is a slick, contemporary sheen to the band’s delivery, even as Bradshaw rasps rhyming hipsterisms. “Train” also features a fairly wailing little sax solo and a clacking railroad drumbeat.

But as I said, its impact was not immediate. Instead, its influence would flower over the course of the next several decades, revealing that Tiny Bradshaw’s minor recording had somehow ingrained itself in rock and roll’s DNA. In 1956, the Johnny Burnette Trio would cut a version of “Train” that subtracted the horns and added what would become one of the most emulated guitar riffs in history.

Burnette transformed the jump blues original (itself adapted from a 12-bar blues boogie) into a smoking hot rockabilly raver, so unhinged in its delivery that one might even call it proto-punk.

Bradshaw, always in relatively poor health, would decline dramatically through a series of strokes in the mid-50s, before succumbing at age 51 in 1958. Though Bradshaw’s recording of “Train Kept A-Rollin” is not well known, Burnette’s deconstructive take found its way into the repertoire of British blues enthusiasts, The Yardbirds, who brought it with them when they folded into Led Zeppelin. From Zeppelin’s live arsenal into Aerosmith’s, where it remains even to the present date, “Train Kept A-Rollin” keeps on a-rollin’ (terrible pun intended).

See the full list of 50 Songs that Gave Birth to Rock and Roll