I still remember the taste of black coffee and Marlboros curling through my parents’ small farmhouse kitchen, the radio hissing faint static behind a procession of biscuit tins, jars of preserves, and my father’s battered old hat. There, under hazy lamplight and practical Dutch lace, I first heard a song that would wrap itself around my world for decades to come—a song almost lost in the fray of country music’s golden age.
The year was 1977. Everybody then was talking about Dolly and Kenny, about Willie’s bandana and Emmylou’s heartbreak angel voice. Meanwhile, some of us, quietly and stubbornly, tuned to the far left of the dial for something else. That’s where, late one Thursday night, Dutch Radio Hilversum introduced me to Bobby Swanson’s “Railroad Hands (If You Hear Me, Mama).”
It was a faded 45, pressed by a label I’d never heard of out of Oklahoma, that somehow surfaced in our farmhouse collection. My cousin Joost must have swapped it on a trip to England, or perhaps it hitched a ride from a Texan G.I. stationed in Germany; back then, records could travel twice round the world and land at your feet like a message in a bottle.
The opening chords are what grabbed me—open G, a hesitating pedal steel, the brush of snare just behind the beat. There was a shyness to it, a resistance to the gloss of Nashville. Swanson’s voice is the kind that’s been sanded down by loss, equal parts dirt and honey, raw around the edges. I listened, breath hanging in the cold air, as he sang:
“Empty cup beside me, echoes bouncing off the door,
Mama, can you hear me, like the trains I used to board?”
The way he hung on “Mama” made you feel like a boy alone in a depot at midnight, or like the last passenger on an eastbound train. Swanson wrote about the life of railroad laborers after the lines started closing, men forgotten by time, who still called out to their mothers as grown men—homesick, hope-drunk, heartsick as a calf away from his pasture.
That song never charted on Billboard. It never played on the jukebox in Helmond’s now-shuttered Country Saloon, where I cut my teeth as a hack picker. But it has outlasted the hits in my own memory, because in it I found something true, something that spoke even to a Dutch farm boy who’d never seen an American boxcar. Heartache, longing, the sound of tracks running endless into the fog—that’s the universal.
“Tell me there’s a supper waiting, tell me I’m not gone,
Blow your lamp out gently, Mama, won’t be long.”
There’s a peculiar ache to those lines—so plainspoken, yet full of faith suspended in the face of miles and years. When my own father died, after years of hard work and nicotine-stained days, I would sometimes slip away from the mourners and sit with that song in my headphones. I wasn’t sure who I was singing for—my father, my mother, or myself. But every time that warbling, unpolished voice called out for home, I felt the world shrink back to the kitchen where I first heard it.
What set “Railroad Hands (If You Hear Me, Mama)” apart from other ballads was its humility. Unlike the grand anthems of that era—songs painting the West in broad, cinematic strokes—Swanson knelt instead by the small and persistent memories: the worn grip of a thermos, the sag of a bunk at shift’s end, a mother’s lamp burning a little past midnight in the hope her son would come home. It was the grace in the ordinary that struck me, and struck me still.
Some nights, after a country gig on the Markt, I’d walk home absent-mindedly singing its chorus, even as the rain stitched my coat to my shoulders. The song would loop in my mind, a lullaby for the working men who vanish at sunset, blending into the rhythm of trains that used to cut through Helmond before the lines closed and cornfields replaced the rails.
“Steel wheels rolling under, voices lost in smoke,
Write me if you see me, Mama, waiting by the oak.”
I suppose what I admired most was the bravery in that wishing—for letters that would never come, for signals that might be lost in the prairie dark. It’s easy to write songs about arrival, about lovers reuniting or sons coming home. But Swanson sang about never quite arriving, about the hope you keep even as the world moves on. That’s the bedrock of country for me: faith not in the future, but in the wishing itself.
Every handful of years, some ardent collector will ask me what my favorite deep cut is, or what song never got its due. I always tell them about “Railroad Hands (If You Hear Me, Mama),” and most of them haven’t heard more than a rumor of it. Sometimes I’ll play it beneath the neon of a half-empty bar and watch a few heads lift, surprised by its tender ache. I hope my audience catches what I did that winter night long ago: that redemption can hide in the smallest places, in the tired voices left out of the big books, in the echo of “Mama” drifting down a line gone to weed.
In a world that prizes novelty and spectacle, some magic can only be found in the patient hush of a song meant for no one but you and the ghosts in your kitchen. So if you ever come across Bobby Swanson’s “Railroad Hands (If You Hear Me, Mama),” maybe on a cracked LP or buried in the static of a half-watt station, listen close. You just might hear your own longing rolling down the track.
Kroes den Bock