M.T.A. (song)

"M.T.A.", often called "The MTA Song", is a 1948 song written as "Charley on the MTA" by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes. The lyrics are about a man named Charlie trapped on Boston's subway system, then known as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The song was a 1959 hit when recorded and released by The Kingston Trio, an American folk group.

The song is so well known in Boston that the subway system has named its electronic card-based fare collection system the "CharlieCard".

Overview

The song's lyrics 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 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 couldn't get off of that train!

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" — though of course, she could have just handed 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, in the natural break in the phrasing, audiences familiar with the song often shout out "Poor Old Charlie!".

In the Kingston Trio recording, after the final chorus, the song's lead singer Nick Reynolds speaks the words: "Et tu, Charlie?" ("You too, Charlie?"), an echo of Julius Caesar's famous "Et tu, Brute?" ("You too, Brutus?")

History

The song, based on a much older version called "The Ship That Never Returned" (or its railroad successor, "Wreck of the Old 97"), is said to have been composed in 1948 as part of the election campaign of Walter A. O'Brien, a Progressive Party candidate for Boston mayor. As the story goes, 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").

According to this story, 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.

A different story holds that the name "George O'Brien" was taken from a campaign for business manager of the MTA carmen's union, which represented streetcar and trackless trolley operators. During the campaign, many MTA workers put up advertising material for their candidate and the seeming omni-presence of the name of George O'Brien, who won the election and served as business manager of Local 7 and later as its legal counsel, was the actual inspiration for the name in the song.

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 a road that passes the 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.

Popular culture

• 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.
• Walt Kelly's classic comic strip Pogo honored the song with the Christmas-carol parody song Deck Us All With Boston Charlie".

Music

• The Chad Mitchell Trio song "Super Skier," written Bob Gibson, 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.
• 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."
• The Front Porch Country Band has recorded a song called "The Man Who Finally Returned" about Charlie getting off the MTA.
• Bob Haworth, a member of The Kingston Trio from 1985 to 2005, wrote and recorded a song called "MTA Revisited" in 2004.

External links

• Charlie on the MTA lyrics and history