The MTA Song
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"The MTA Song", often called "Charlie on the MTA", is a 1948 song written by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes, about a man named Charlie trapped on Boston's subway system, then known as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). It was a hit in 1959 when it was recorded by The Kingston Trio, an American folk group.
In fact, the song is so well-known in Boston that the subway system has named its electronic card-based fare collection system the "CharlieCard".
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[edit] Overview
The song tells of Charlie, a man who gets aboard an MTA subway car and can't get off because he didn't bring enough money for the "exit fares" that were established to collect an increased fare without upgrading existing fare collection equipment.
- When he got there the conductor told him:
- "One more nickel."
- Charlie could not get off of that train!
Perhaps to show it shouldn't be taken too seriously, the song goes on to say that Charlie's wife is able to hand him a sandwich every day "as the train comes rumbling through" — but for some reason can't hand him a nickel!
The song is probably best known for its catchy chorus:
- Did he ever return,
- No he never returned
- And his fate is still unlearn'd
- He may ride forever
- 'neath the streets of Boston
- He's the man who never returned.
After the third line of the chorus, it has become common for the audience to shout out "POOR OLD CHARLIE!!!" as loudly as they can.
In the Kingston Trio recording, after the final chorus, one of the members speaks the words: "Et tu, Charlie?" ("You too, Charlie"), an echo of Julius Caesar's famous "Et tu, Brute?" ("You too, Brutus?")
[edit] History
The song, based on a much older tune called "The Ship That Never Returned" (or its railroad successor, "Wreck of the Old 97"), was written in 1948 as part of the election campaign of Walter A. O'Brien, a Progressive Party candidate for Boston mayor. O'Brien was unable to afford radio advertisements, so he enlisted local folk singers to write and sing songs from a touring truck with a loudspeaker (he was later fined $10 for "disturbing the peace").
One of his major campaign planks was to lower the price of riding the subway by removing the complicated fare structure involving exit fares - so complicated that at one point it required a nine-page explanatory booklet. In the Kingston Trio recording, the name "Walter A. O'Brien" was changed to "George O'Brien," apparently to avoid risking right-wing protests that had hit an earlier recording during the Joseph McCarthy Hollywood blacklist era, when the song was seen as celebrating a progressive politician.
[edit] Geography
The song has Charlie boarding at Kendall Square and changing for Jamaica Plain. Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood in Boston, which was an area served by a streetcar line that terminated at Arborway (a reference to Arnold Arboretum), near present-day Forest Hills station. Service operated to Arborway until 1985, when the streetcar route was truncated to Heath Street at the northern edge of Jamaica Plain, today's Green Line "E" Branch. The "Charlie Card" depicts a fellow on a Green Line streetcar.
If his wife visited him every day at the Scollay Square station (now called Government Center), he must have been on what is now the Green Line (rapid transit lines in Boston were not color-coded until 1965). His "change for Jamaica Plain" must therefore have been at the centrally placed Park Street.
[edit] Popular culture
- The Chad Mitchell Trio song "Super Skier" re-used the tune and ends with a call to "get Charlie off the MTA"
- The Boston-based punk rock band Dropkick Murphys made a variation of the song, "Skinhead on the MBTA", that featured a skinhead in the place of Charlie, on their 1998 album Do or Die. MBTA is the current name of the subway system (since 1964), known colloquially as "the T".
- A Subway Named Mobius is a short story by A.J. Deutsch in which a mathematics professor makes a topological discovery after becoming 'lost' on the MBTA. A 1996 Argentinian movie, Moebius, has a very similar plot.
- The computer scientist Henry Baker references the song in his paper CONS Should Not CONS Its Arguments, Part II: Cheney on the M.T.A., which describes a way of implementing Cheney's algorithm using C functions that, like Charlie, never return.
- The song was sung on Malcolm in the Middle in the episode 'Long Drive' when Hal and his friends sing it at a dinner.
- Frank Black sings "You can't get off your stop / Like old Charlie on the MTA" in his song "Living on Soul."
