"M.T.A.", often called "The MTA Song", is a 1949 song by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes. Known informally as "Charlie on the MTA", the song's lyrics tell of a man named Charlie trapped on Boston's subway system, then known as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The song was originally recorded as a mayoral campaign song for Progressive Party candidate Walter A. O'Brien. A version of the song with the candidate's name changed became a 1959 hit when recorded and released by the Kingston Trio, an American folk group.[1]
The song has become so entrenched in Boston lore that the Boston-area transit authority named its electronic card-based fare collection system the "CharlieCard" as a tribute to this song.[2] The transit organization, now called the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), held a dedication ceremony for the card system in 2004 which featured a performance of the song by the Kingston Trio and then-governor Mitt Romney.[3][1]
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The song's lyrics[4] tell of Charlie, a man who gets aboard an MTA subway car. Charlie can't get off the subway as he didn't bring enough money for the "exit fares" that had just been established to collect an increased fare without upgrading existing fare collection equipment.
The song goes on to say that every day Charlie's wife is able to hand him a sandwich (but not, for some reason, a nickel) "as the train comes rumbling through." In an alternate version (heard live in 2008 at a performance in Viroqua, WI) she hands him a Starbucks (coffee)—again without the additional nickel that would buy him his freedom. It is probably best known for its catchy chorus:
After the third line of the chorus, in the natural break in the phrasing, audiences familiar with the song often call out "Poor Old Charlie!" or "What a pity!"
In the Kingston Trio recording, after the final chorus, the song's lead singer Nick Reynolds speaks the words: "Et tu, Charlie?", an echo of Julius Caesar's famous "Et tu, Brute?" ("You too, Brutus?")
The song, based on a much older version called "The Ship That Never Returned" (or its railroad successor, "Wreck of the Old 97"), was composed in 1949 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").[4][5]
One of O'Brien's 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. The Progressive Party had opposed the public buyout of Boston's streetcar system, which it argued enriched the previous private ownership and was followed by higher fares to city residents. In the Kingston Trio recording, the name "Walter A. O'Brien" was changed to "George O'Brien", apparently to avoid risking protests that had hit an earlier recording, when the song was seen as celebrating a socialist politician.[6][1]
The song has Charlie boarding at the Kendall Square station (now called Kendall/MIT) and changing for Jamaica Plain. Kendall is on the Red Line (the lines were not color-coded until 1965), so his "change for Jamaica Plain" would have been at Park Street. There, he would have boarded a #39 streetcar (later the Green Line "E" Branch) for Jamaica Plain. In 1949 the line went all the way to Arborway in Jamaica Plain, but the line was truncated to Heath Street at the northern edge of Jamaica Plain in 1985.
The song further mentions that his wife visited him every day at Scollay Square, which today is Government Center on the Green Line. The "Charlie Card"—the MBTA's ticket system introduced in 2006—depicts a man on a Green Line streetcar.