Long before Soul Train ever became an American TV music show, there was the jazz train – and this one had wheels. It was used by jazz saxophonist Curtis Ousley.
To try to buy himself more hours in the day, he had impulsively bought Cannonball Adderley's customised railway carriage with the hope of saving wasted time at airports by travelling to distant venues hitched to a Pennsylvania Railroad train. But the train was old and needed constant repairs, and the time he saved on journeys was eaten up with endless phone calls to railway engineers in the Bronx. Infamously King Curtis had once waved away James Brown's claims to be 'the hardest working man in show business' by saying dismissively, 'He can't be that busy if he has time to boast about it.'
Harlem 69: The Future of Soul, Stuart Cosgrove
Not only did he save time through not having to hang around at airports and travel between them and his gigs, he could also rehearse on the train; difficult to do on a plane – and dreadful acoustics! It seems touring by train was not uncommon for musicians in America at the time: the book is the last part of a trilogy, the first of which (Detroit 67) mentions Motown tours of 'the Chitling circuit' by train. (Chitlings are boiled pigs' intestines, favoured food of poor Black Americans in the South at the time.) But how many had a customised carriage?
Unfortunately Mr Google isn't favouring me with any information or photos of the Cannonbury-Curtis customised train, but there is a Funky Train:
https://youtu.be/9AAE771MHHwThe books, by the way, are interesting but the first two at least are not very well written, or rather I think not well edited: lots of repetition as if assembled from shorter pieces. But interesting from a musical and social perspective. And 'the wrong side of the tracks' seems to have been a literal description in segregated Memphis.
