The year was 1978, a year that most folks remember for Dolly Parton’s Jolene making waves all over the radio, and for the beginnings of country-pop twang blending into the mainstream. But if you were sitting in my father’s chipped green Opel Kadett, rattling your elbows along the broken canals near Helmond, the song that stayed with you wasn’t any chart-topper. It was a deep, winding melody called “Yellow River Train” by Lionel Cartwright—yes, a name familiar to earnest country fans but not quite a household echo in the Netherlands, nor even in Nashville.
I was nineteen and feeling like I’d already lived a dozen hard, glorious years. My pa kept a fat stack of cassettes slotted beneath the sun-bleached dashboard, and he had a soft spot for the oddball tracks—songs that, for one reason or another, never got their due. On Friday nights, we’d idle on the grass behind the old brickwork Philips factory, the air smelling of rain and roasted endives, and he’d cue up “Yellow River Train” on the tape deck like it was our own secret hymn.
That plaintive, slide-guitar introduction—sharp as a river stone—kept me company through all the turbulent, sometimes lonely, moments of my young life. What made the song special was its plain honesty, its refusal to be clever or brash. Lionel Cartwright, a soft-voiced American with sad, seeing eyes, had penned it just a year before in ’77 during a rough patch working out of a Kentucky railway town. It wasn’t widely covered, and never cracked the top 50, but here in Helmond, with the rain ticking down on the windshield, it was everything.
The chorus still echoes in my memory:
*”Yellow River train, take me home again
To fields I’ve never seen, and hearts that might remember
Rusted rails behind, and old farewells to mend
Yellow River train, roll me on forever.”*
There’s a myth to the “going home” motif in country music, but Cartwright gave it more shade, tender uncertainty—maybe even regret. The destination isn’t a real place at all, but some imagined forgiveness out there between the rusted rails and restless sky.
The verses spun portraits right out of my own heart:
*”I left my mama crying on the station’s rugged floor
Left my brother’s shadow stretching out the kitchen door
There’s towns I never loved, and hearts I never held
But I keep on riding, hoping life ain’t just farewell.”*
I remember asking pa why he liked it so much, and he only said, “Some songs are quiet but hit you where you live.” I think what he meant was that everyone’s waiting for their Yellow River Train, and everyone’s got fields they’ve never seen, hearts that might remember—sometimes, country is less about the road you’re on than the longing twined through your bones.
That summer, I worked in the farm sheds off Rijpelberg, stacking potatoes and dreaming of the Texas prairies I’d only seen in Alan Ladd westerns. The peeling radio blared the same half-dozen hits on repeat, but at the end of the day, crammed into the creased seats of that Opel, Cartwright’s mournful train took me somewhere else. The song’s beauty was in its humility—soft rustlings of cymbals and an understated harmonica, like the wind running alongside dikes at dusk.
I see now that what I loved most about “Yellow River Train” was how it gave voice to the in-between places in a man’s life: the faint hope after heartbreak, the backward glance after waving goodbye, the promise that maybe—just maybe—there’s solace somewhere down the line. The lyrics didn’t promise redemption, but hinted at the worth of searching:
*”Clouds like linen blankets, cover up the dawn
I count the rusty boxcars, keep my memories warm
I ride away from sorrow, I ride away from blame
But heartache’s just a whistle, on the Yellow River Train.”*
There was something healing in that line—heartache’s just a whistle. No pretension. No silver lining forced onto the story. Just a recognition that sadness isn’t the end; sometimes, it’s just part of the scenery, passing by, not lasting forever.
In the years that followed, as I picked up a battered guitar and learned to write my own songs about longing and loss (albeit with a Dutch twist), I kept that chorus tucked in my heart. When the world hurt, or when I felt the weight of being ‘different’—a Dutch lad singing country ballads to folks who sometimes laughed—I’d remember Cartwright’s voicing of the everyday, unspectacular ache, and find courage in its gentle persistence.
Helmond, with its tight-knit terraces and blue-collar roots, gave me plenty of story fodder. But it was the quiet Americana of “Yellow River Train” that taught me to write honestly, to give as much room to doubt as to hope, and to let silences hang as long as they needed. Even today, if you catch me after a set in a smoky café on the Markt, loosening my strings and humming, it’s likely that Cartwright’s lonesome train is rolling somewhere in the back of my mind.
Country music can be big, brash, full of rhinestone glory, but real country—what lasts—is soft-handed, unafraid to linger on life’s unsolved riddles. “Yellow River Train” is that kind of song. Maybe you never heard it; maybe tonight you’ll hunt for a crackling old recording. If so, listen close for the sound of home not quite found, and the bittersweet promise that all our journeys are, in some way, worth singing about.
With a quiet nod to you, Lionel Cartwright—thank you for writing the kind of song that carried a young Dutch dreamer through the roughest seasons.
Yours in memory and melody,
Kroes den Bock