"Big Joe and Phantom 309"

'Nighthawks at the Diner', 1975

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“Big Joe and Phantom 309” is the first song Tom put on an album that he didn’t write. It remains to this day one of a very few covers he’s included on his own records. There’s this, “Somewhere,” the “California, Here I Come” half of the Foreign Affairs medley, “'T Ain't No Sin” off of The Black Rider, and that’s about it. Plenty of covers in other contexts, of course — wrote about one just recently — but he tends to keep them off his own albums.

"Big Joe and Phantom 309" is a centerpiece of Nighthawks at the Diner though. It’s more a spoken-word piece than a song, really. It tells the spooky tale of a hitchhiker hitching a ride with a ghost — the ghost of a trucker who (and this part’s a true story) deliberately drove his truck into a bridge abutment and sacrificed his life to avoid hitting a school bus full of children.

The original artist, Red Sovine, had a bit of a run making maudlin country songs about truckers in the mid-’60s. His other hits included “Giddyup Go” about a trucker being reunited with his son and “Teddy Bear” about a disabled boy and his CB radio. 

Tom, though, learned it from a version that Ray Bierl performed around San Diego. “This is the first real folk song that just knocked me out,” Tom said in the intro to an earlier live version. “I heard Ray do it - it gave me chills up and down my back." Ray didn’t record his version at the time, but he did many years later:

In the years between Red Sovine’s 1967 hit and Tom’s 1975 cover, “Phantom 309” had become sort of a second-tier country staple. It was an era of songs about truckers — the best known, C.W. McCall’s goofy “Convoy,” came out within a month of Nighthawks — and a number of the early “Phantom 309” covers came out on concept albums about driving trucks.

Here’s my favorite of those pre-Tom versions:

The song seems an odd choice for Nighthawks at the Diner. The spoken-word angle fits the just-ramblin’-from-my-barstool energy, but it’s more folkie than the jazzbo leanings elsewhere. And, at six and a half minutes, it really drags. Tom’s done spoken-word-over-music numbers way better since that (see: half of the third disc of Orphans), but with this one I find I tune out before I even reach the conclusion of this endless story. Maybe it was a hit in the coffeehouses he was performing it, but it doesn’t earn its place on the album.

Coming up next: Tom plays angklung with the devil

PS. Just because I got a kick out of looking them up, here are the covers of a few of those trucker-themed concept albums with early “Big Joe and Phantom 309” recordings. People sure did love country songs about truckers back then!