Speaking of my own compositions, here's my latest. I'm sorry, I don't have a reasonable demo recording yet.
This is about my paternal grandfather, Henrick Holtz, aka "Hank." Hank was widely considered a hardass by family and friends alike. He once threatened a union boss with a large pipe wrench (Hank was a plumbing contractor) because union reps had dared lay hands on his two sons to get them off a worksite. He was not a man to be taken lightly. A great portion of his hardness and grouchiness probably stemmed from the fact that he lived most of his life in pain due to a childhood injury to his hip. In later years it nearly crippled him, and it ultimately killed him. He was having surgery to repair it when he stroked out in 1978.
But there was a story about him that my dad and my grandmother told me, that seemed to me entirely incongruous with the man. In 1932 as the US economy finally crashed to the ground and the Great Depression set in like a ton of bricks, Hank hopped freight trains to get from North Dakota to California to get to Berniece Spotswood - my grandmother, the school-marm daughter of a wealthy Scot merchant, who had relocated to California earlier in the year. Hank, who'd been a railroad telegrapher, jumped freight trains to get to Berniece.
Anyway, I worked out his route given the realities of the railroads in 1932, and that inspired this song.
Great Northern
(C) 2025 Bret Holtz/Grunzleworks
All Rights Reserved
Wall Street is a long way
from Willow City
A workin' stiff in Dakota
Don't know what it means
Banks failed in Chicago
And strangled the small towns
It don't take much stranglin'
To put a man on his knees
An old Scot saw it comin'
God only knows how
Took his family and fortune
And headed west for the coast
California's a long way from Willow City
But one of his daughters
Got down in your soul
But you can't afford a ticket
So you'll wager flesh and bone
To hop a westbound freight to Spokane
Chasing fortune on your own
If the prairie sun don't scorch you
You might freeze in mountain cold
Runnin' from the devil
On the long Great Northern Road
Now to say she's a beauty
Might beggar the truth some
Call her velvet and rawhide
She was born on the plains
On the dirt where you stand
You ain't got much to offer
And gentle grace in a woman
Goes an awful long way
But you can't afford a ticket
So you'll wager flesh and bone
To get from Spokane on to Portland
Chasing fortune on your own
If the railroad bulls don't kill you
And you don't get mugged and rolled
Then it's Portland south to Stockton
On the Southern Pacific road
You're a hard man in a hard time
That's what anybody'd say
And your bum hip
Gonna hurt like hell
When you're jumpin' from a train
But the iron in you only goes so deep
It don't reach into your soul
If you'll chase the love of a woman
From Dakota to the coast
You can't afford a ticket
So you'll bet your flesh and bone
Riding boxcar after flat car
Weeks on end alone...
You can't afford a ticket
So you'll bet your flesh and bone
To get from Stockton west to San Jose
You can walk from there alone
If those tons of steel don't crush you
On the lonely iron road
Maybe someday you'll find somethin'
That you can call your own
And maybe someday some old picker
Who used to tag along beside you
When you were an old man
And he was a child
Will sing your railroad song.
