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Troop Train

from inveRNario by Nino Rivera

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In the late 70’s I worked closely with John whist recording his ‘Matinees on Saturdays’ album, and shortly after it’s release he sang me Troop Train for the first time on the steps leading into the gardens of “The Grand Hotel” (as he called his sprawling old farmhouse in Lyndhurst, Johannesburg). It’s the only one of many of John’s songs that I’ve continued singing.

Being an Italian citizen and never having been drafted to the SA army I didn’t have first hand experience of the emotions one goes through getting onto a troop train. I have seen the damaged friends that did return from the atrocities of war. John, in his inimitable way, conveys in Troop Train the emotions and contrasts of peace and war, freedom and fear of the unknown so vividly that I almost feel to be one of those poor suckers boarding the train when I sing it.

John feels my rendition a bit funereal, but I too wasn’t ready to die for a cause that still has no space in my understanding of what it means to be a peace-loving member of the human species. So I sing this song with anger at the stupidity of war and warmongers, very differently from how I have heard John’s more cynical interpretation.

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from inveRNario, released April 22, 2017
John Oakley Smith circa 1980

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Rootspring Cape Town, South Africa

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