M.T.A. (song)

The Kingston Trio version begins with a spoken recitation by Dave Guard accompanied by a bowed bass fiddle: "These are the times that try men's souls. In the course of our nation's history, the people of Boston have rallied bravely whenever the rights of men have been threatened. Today, a new crisis has arisen. The Metropolitan Transit Authority, better known as the MTA, is attempting to levy a burdensome tax on the population, in the form of a subway fare increase. Citizens, hear me out! This could happen to you."

The song's lyrics tell of Charlie, a man who boards an MTA subway car, but then cannot get off because he does not have enough money for the new "exit fares". These additional charges had just been established to collect an increased fare without replacing existing fare collection equipment.

{{quote|When he got there the conductor told him,

"One more nickel."

Charlie couldn't get off of that train.}}

The song goes on to say that every day Charlie's wife hands him a sandwich "as the train comes rumbling through" because he is stranded on the train. It is probably best known for its chorus:

{{quote|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, in the natural break in the phrasing, audiences familiar with the song often call out "Poor Old Charlie!" or "What a pity!"

As the song fades out, the words "Et tu, Charlie?" are spoken by Nick Reynolds, meaning "You too, Charlie?"

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").{{cite web | last=Reed | first=Jonathan | title=Charlie on the M.T.A. | website=MIT | date=Jan 29, 2019 | url=https://www.mit.edu/~jdreed/t/charlie.html | access-date=Aug 6, 2019}}{{cite magazine |url=http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/publications/Banned_in_Red_Scare_Boston.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120609012137/http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/publications/Banned_in_Red_Scare_Boston.pdf |archive-date=2012-06-09 |title=Banned in Red Scare Boston: The Forgotten Story of Charlie and the "M.T.A." |magazine=Dissent |date=Spring 2008 |first1=Peter |last1=Dreier |first2=Jim |last2=Vrabel |df=mdy-all}}

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. O'Brien criticized the city’s acquisition of the privately run streetcar system. He contended that the public buyout disproportionately benefited the former private owners and resulted in higher fares for commuters. 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.See [http://www.rodmacdonald.net/usa.htm letter from Kate O'Brien Hartig], daughter of Walter, to Rod MacDonald, February 3, 2001. Retrieved July 26, 2007.

The song has Charlie boarding at the Kendall Square station (now called Kendall/MIT) and changing for Jamaica Plain. Kendall is on what is now 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 (now Forest Hills) 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 Chad Mitchell Trio song "Super Skier", written by Bob Gibson, used the tune and although its lyrics have nothing to do with subways, ends with a call to "get Charlie off the MTA".
• Boston-based punk rock band Dropkick Murphys wrote a variation, Skinhead on the MBTA, with a skinhead in place of Charlie, on their 1998 album Do or Die.
• The Front Porch Country Band recorded a song called "The Man Who Finally Returned" about Charlie getting off the MTA because the track's renovation during the Big Dig.
• Bob Haworth, a member of The Kingston Trio, wrote and recorded a song called "MTA Revisited" in 2003.{{Cite web |title=Bob Haworth's CD |url=http://www.folkusa.org/mta.html |access-date=2024-07-21 |website=www.folkusa.org}}
• Fred Small wrote and recorded a parody called "Sergei in the Milky Way" with the true story of Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov, who was temporarily stranded in space when the Soviet Union broke up. Small mimicked the Kingston Trio arrangement almost note for note.
• Frank Black sings "You can't get off your stop / Like old Charlie on the MTA" in his song "Living on Soul".
• In Malcolm in the Middle, the song was performed by Hal's bluegrass group The Gentleman Callers, in the episode "Long Drive".
• In response to the 2022 monthlong shutdown of the MBTA Orange Line, a group of local musicians gathered at Back Bay Station to perform a parody called "Charlie (Baker) on the MBTA," with lyrics mocking the shutdown as well as Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker's reputation for never utilizing public transit while in office.{{cite web |title=In response to the 30 day Orange Line shut down we flash-mobbed on the platform of Back Bay Station for an encore of "Charlie (Baker) on the MBTA": #boston #charlieonthemta #mbta #orangeline #orangelineshutdown |url=https://twitter.com/viracochalvsbac/status/1559994891903664129 |website=Twitter |access-date=25 August 2022}} A clip from the performance was featured on All Things Considered's segment about the shutdown.{{cite news |last1=Rios |first1=Simon |title=Boston's Orange Line will be shut down for a month for repairs |url=https://www.npr.org/2022/08/19/1118519200/bostons-orange-line-will-be-shut-down-for-a-month-for-repairs |access-date=25 August 2022 |agency=NPR |date=19 August 2022}}
• Dave Van Ronk recorded "Georgie on the IRT", about a man who is decapitated by a closing door on the New York subway, leaving his body at Times Square while his head endlessly rides back and forth to Flatbush Avenue.

• 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.

{{cite journal

|author=Henry G. Baker

|date=Aug 1, 1995

|issn=0362-1340

|title=CONS Should Not CONS Its Arguments, part II: Cheney on the M.T.A.

|url=http://www.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html

|journal=ACM SIGPLAN Notices

|volume=30

|issue=9

|pages=17–20

|doi=10.1145/214448.214454

|s2cid=20720831

|url-access=subscription

}}

• The computer scientists Guy L. Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman also make reference to the song in one of the Lambda Papers when discussing functions such as the Lisp driver loop which never returns, just like Charlie in the song.

{{cite tech report

|author1=Guy Lewis Steele Jr.

|author2=Gerald Jay Sussman

|year=1978

|title=The Art of the Interpreter or, The Modularity Complex (Parts Zero, One, and Two)

|url=http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-453.pdf

|institution=MIT AI Laboratory

|number=AIM-453 |page=67

|hdl=1721.1/6094

|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180219025656/http://repository.readscheme.org/ftp/papers/ai-lab-pubs/AIM-453.pdf

|archive-date=2018-02-19 |df=mdy-all

}}

• List of train songs

{{reflist|30em}}

• [https://www.mit.edu/~jdreed/t/charlie.html Charlie on the MTA lyrics and history]
• [http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/obituaries/articles/2009/12/01/bess_l_hawes_folklorist_co_wrote_the_mta/ Boston Globe obituary of Bess Hawes]
• {{YouTube|CHx4_uPv0K8|Video with soundtrack of the Kingston Trio recording}}
• [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier-and-jim-vrabel/will-charlie-ever-get-off_b_167136.html "Will Charlie Ever Get Off That Train?" by Peter Dreier and Jim Vrabel]

{{MBTA}}

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Category:1949 songs

Category:1959 singles

Category:Capitol Records singles

Category:Songs about trains

Category:Songs about Boston

Category:The Kingston Trio songs

Category:Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority

Category:Protest songs