Word: caseys
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...Casey sat on her bed a-sighin', Just received a message that poor Casey...
Engineer John Luther ("Casey") Jones highballed the Illinois Central's Cannonball No. 1 out of Memphis an hour and 35 minutes late. His throttle hand urged the Cannonball south along Mississippi's Big Black River at 75 m.p.h. while Casey exulted in its power. "Sim," he shouted to his fireman, "the old lady's got her high-heeled slippers on tonight." Minutes later he saw the freight cars parked on the track ahead. "Jump, Sim," cried Casey, "and save yourself." Fireman Simeon Webb jumped and lived. But Casey Jones, on the night of April 30, 1900, roared...
That legend was a legacy of bitterness to Janie Jones, Casey's wife, mother of his daughter and two sons. For the next 58 years she lived with The Ballad of Casey Jones-and with the cruel lines added to a Negro engine wiper's mournful song by a Tin Pan Alley hack. "The Casey Jones song has haunted my whole life since the beginning of the century," she once said. Memphis railroaders were known to fight with strangers who sang the slanderous lines. For a while, the ballad was banned in Jackson, Tenn., where Janie Jones lived...
Cock-a-Doodle Dandy (by Sean O'Casey) waited nine years to reach New York, and then turned up off Broadway. Written long after O'Casey's lusty, naturalistic prime, it is streaked with fantasy and symbolism. Its man-sized crowing cock is everything that Ireland, for O'Casey, is not-life-loving, joyous, free. Against his feathered friend O'Casey sets all his inveterate foes-ignorant old windbags, bullying priests, superstition-clogged rustics, tightfisted employers. Above all, a tyrannic Puritanism blasts the temptations of the flesh, makes war on warmblooded temptresses...
With its scarifyingly freakish weather, eerie sounds and collapsing houses, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy becomes at times a farcical free-for-all, as at other times it blares a propagandist freedom-for-no-one. Much of the writing, whether wrathful, lyrical or lowdown, has the true O'Casey tang. And despite symbols that are more like stencils and incidents too much like one another, Cock-a-Doodle Dandy has its amusing scenes and its fiery ones. Unhappily, in a quite un-Gaelic and ponderous production, there emerges nothing of the robustly comic playwright; the horseplay is elephantine, the darts...