James Brown - Night Train

All Aboard

It takes about one hour of driving to reach Walled Lake, Michigan from Jackson, Michigan. In and of itself, that doesn’t mean much to people outside of southeast Michigan, but it’s ingrained in my hippocampus. One hour was the average length of a mix tape. Sure, one could get a 90-minute tape, but they were poorly made with suspect sound quality. Maxell and TDK were the Ali and Frazier in the blank cassette ring. Accept no substitutes.

Sixty minutes from the McDonald’s in Jackson - the pre-arranged drop-off point between mom and dad - to my dad’s place. Sixty minutes of tunes to mark the time. The end of side A marked the halfway point, and when you’re a kid, an hour is forever.

An extra hour to play outside, two-hour school snow delays, staying up an extra hour because dad wants to show you this great movie from back in the day… an hour was everything, and any time with dad was sacred.

Why is this song the most important James Brown track on my list? Simple. It’s not. Again, this isn’t about ranking songs or deciding which is “the best” James Brown track. That’s a listicle writer’s exercise or one for algorithmic playlists. Pick the best James Brown track? Go ahead and kiss my whole ass. My dad put it on a mix tape, THE MIX TAPE, and when I was a wee lad my dad’s taste was the Torah - The Law, y’all. I don’t know where the damned tape is, but I’ve tried to reconstruct it from memory on several different occasions because its influence on my taste in incalculable. I mean exactly that.

That 60-minute jam session served up country-fried rockabilly from Memphis by way of Jerry Lee and Johnny Cash, honey-dripping Doo Wop courtesy of The Drifters, sure-fire, can’t miss, wholly flawless rhythm and blues from Ray Charles and Big Joe Turner, sainted pop music by way of Bobby Darin, saccharine sweet ballad nectar from Louis Armstrong and Ivory Joe Hunter, blistering Windy City barrelhouse from LaVern Baker, garage rock from Madchester Brits, and then some. Those artists played pianos like percussion instruments, saxophones honked like steam train engines in the night, drumkits transmogrified into perpetual motion machines, and guitars took on a sneering upper lip like they had an attitude problem and a pack-a-day habit.

I recognize that I haven’t gotten to the central point of this piece, and I accept this. The why is always the most important part of any investigation. The how and when are incidental. The where is seldom the lead between father and son, but the who and when are crucial.

Dad’s at the wheel, piloting a Ford Econoline work van through all measures of Michigan weather - downpours, deluges, blizzards, the dreaded and ambiguous “wintry mix,” “Bridge may be icy” conditions, and occasionally bright sunshine. The back is rattling with tools and equipment, the passenger seat is rattling with me - a perpetual motion machine all my own - bouncing and playing air piano, drums, and guitar, sometimes all in one music bar.

Enter James Joseph Brown, central progenitor of funk, Mr. Dynamite, Hardest Working Man in Show Business, Godfather of Soul, and Soul Brother No. 1. Night Train isn’t the best James Brown jam, but it was the first one I remember hearing more than once.

Before he carved out his own universe of stripped-down funk with Cold Sweat, James Brown was a restless traveler through the many landscapes of soul. He put his fingerprints on every style he could find, and when he hit the track with Night Train, he wasn’t riding a groove - he was driving it. The song was a classic, an old-timer that Louis Prima and others had taken for a spin, a melody that pulsed and churned like the rhythm of steel wheels over tracks. It wasn’t just music; it was motion, a locomotive moving forward, circular and relentless.

Brown took that train and made it scream. His version rolls heavy with a rhythm section that doesn't just keep time but sets the tempo of the universe. Over that, horns cut the air like whistles in the night, jazzy and sharp, calling out through the dark. J.C. Davis’s saxophone howls, wails, and crashes like a freight train with no brakes. Brown himself, not upfront, but behind the drum kit, holding it all together with a beat as steady and sure as the tracks beneath the wheels.

But Brown couldn’t stay quiet for long. He starts with a holler - “All aboard the night train!” - a call to arms, or maybe a warning. Then he shouts out the stops, Atlanta, Miami, cities that flicker by like neon in the rain. And when it all winds up, he’s chanting, rallying, “Night train, carry me home,” with a raw urgency that feels like it could break the dawn wide open.

And so it did - weekend after weekend, year after year, the Night Train carried me home, my dad at the helm like the world’s most reliable conductor, navigating those long stretches of Michigan highway as though they were rails laid down just for us. The van rumbled and shook, tools in the back clattering their chaotic percussion, while James Brown’s locomotive groove synced with the whir of tires on asphalt. The stops weren’t Atlanta or Miami; they were Walled Lake and Jackson, two dots on the map connected by an hour that felt like a lifetime when you’re a kid.

James Brown’s Night Train was a ritual, and for a boy in the passenger seat, it was a promise kept - every other weekend, every mile, every note.