This song has been posted before - - you can stream it here - - but I'm in love and cannot help it.Henry 'Ragtime Texas' Thomas was an itinerant musician and inveterate hobo and as such a train freak after my own heart. Thomas was born 1874 in Upshur County, Texas, one in a family of perhaps nine children to parents who had been slaves and who were "even as free people ...still pretty well trapped in the semi-feudal world of the Texas cotton economy" (Oakley 59). Thomas was known to have hated cotton farming and upped and left home as soon as he could, "earning his living with his guitar, or supported by some woman" (59). Eventually "he drifted into the life of a hobo, up and down the line of the Texas and Pacific railroad, through East Texas, up to Oklahoma, to Kansas City, and he even got as far as Chicago for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, and to St. Louis for the World Fair of 1904"(59). In the post-slavery South freedom to blacks became uppermost freedom of movement and whether near or far many embraced the newfound right to ramble; none more than Ragtime Texas. A retired conductor who worked passenger trains out of Dallas named G. T. Hardy thought he remembered Thomas:[he] was a great big fellow that used to come aboard at Gladewater or Mineola or somewhere in there. I'd always carry him except when he was too dirty. He was a regular hobo but I'd carry him most of the time (58).As Oakley writes:In the days when Ragtime Texas was hoboing, 'that guitar was his ticket'. All he would do, if he couldn't ride for free inside the carriage, would be to jump into an empty gondola or box car, or onto the blind end of a baggage car. If all else failed he would ride underneath the cars, on the truss-rods. (58).Thomas seems to have mastered a variety of song styles from square and country dances to gospel to early blues, and he tended to be somewhat of a magpie in making his songs, snatching bits and pieces from various sources. Thomas is also of special interest to me as a player of the "quills," flutes made from cane "from a river bottom."