I learned “Ain’t Gonna Work on the Railroad” from former WOTFA music editor Stuart Williams at a jam at Dusty Strings in Seattle in December of 2014. I know this because I was obsessively recording every jam I went to at the time, and I recently found where I’d saved all my recordings from then. So, as a bonus, here’s a recording of exactly how I learned it, which you may note is not entirely the way I play it now:

Stuart says he learned this tune from George Jenkerson, formerly of North Dakota but residing in Oregon at the time (which must have been prior to the summer of 1979, because I believe that’s when he died). George learned it from his mother some time in the 1910s or 1920s. As I noted in some email I sent shortly after learning the tune, as with so many interesting tunes Stuart knows, there is zero information about this one online. It’s not in the Traditional Tune Archive, there isn’t a recording at Slippery Hill, and if anyone else has ever played it on YouTube, I can’t find it.

I’m pretty sure that Jenkerson was one of the charter members of the Oregon Old Time Fiddlers Association and that he competed in the National Oldtime Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser a number of times. In fact, he’s on the 1973 LP that the contest put out — if anyone has a copy of that, please drop me a line at it@wotfa.org, because I’d love to borrow it, if possible. But aside from that, I haven’t been able to find out much about him. If you knew him, please leave a comment!

I did find this photo on Facebook, from 1972, with Jenkerson on fiddle at the left of the front row:

As a side note, I apologize for not posting a tune in August. Because of some overlapping projects at work, I have been working pretty much nonstop since mid-July, and this is the first day I’ve had off in at least a month. I thought it was fitting that it was Labor Day, and for some reason the title of this tune popped into my head…