“Casey Jones” by The Grateful Dead

"Casey Jones" rolls down the tracks on the Grateful Dead's 1970 album Workingman's Dead, with Jerry Garcia's music and Robert Hunter's words, and it's a cheerful little shuffle about a disaster in the making. Hunter's engineer is barreling along too fast, high on cocaine, with the switchman asleep and another train coming the other way on the same line, and the lyric slips in a sly pun on speed.

The name comes from a real railroad engineer, already the hero of the older folk tune "The Ballad of Casey Jones", which the Dead played live a few times, though their song has nothing to do with his actual wreck. Garcia sings lead, with Bob Weir, Phil Lesh and Ron "Pigpen" McKernan on the harmonies, and Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart keep the wheels chugging.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.