In the 1830s, the state of North Carolina decided that it needed a railway to connect the eastern coastal plains to the western mountains.

A private company stepped in and started construction; but the Civil War interrupted everything.

After the Civil War, the company's misfortunes continued as two scoundrels from within embezzled $2 million and sent it into bankruptcy.

The state of North Carolina then bought the railway company at its bankruptcy auct..

But it had two big problems.

One was that it was bankrupt.

There was no money left in the company with which to build the railway.

Two, people thought it was impossible because to get from the east to the very western tip of North Carolina, you had to cross the Continental Divide, which we know really as the Blue Ridge Mountains.

And this is a geological feature that’s extremely high and very difficult to get a train across.

So that meant you were going to have to blast tunnels through the mountains to get through to the other side.

Which leads us back to the first problem of no money.

So what they did to solve that problem was use convict labor.

That meant they could take prisoners who had been arrested, and they were in jail, and they could take those men and send them to the west to build the railroad and to blast those tunnels through the mountains.

And they were not paid for any of their work.

They had to build their own tools.

They had to take care of themselves.

They worked unbelievably long hours.

A lot of them died.

They were really not considered human beings.

And a lot of, if not all of, these men would have been former slaves.

Between 1875 and 1878, over 3000 men were taken from Raleigh to the construction site.

The majority of them were African-American, and vast numbers of them had been put into jail for very minor infractions for the express purpose of being used for free labor.

To get through the mountains, they had to build a series of tunnels, seven in total, the longest of which was 1800 feet.

And that's the one called Swannanoa Tunnel.

To make these tunnels... it's very hard for us to understand the amount of backbreaking labor that went into this because they did not have the kind of machines that we have now.

They had to make their own tools.

They were using primitive forms of nitroglycerin and, you know, blasting powder.

Some of the men culturally were very afraid of going into tunnels, thinking that, you know, the devil was in there.

And so the mental torture that followed along .. having to be forced to go in, day after day after day.

In 1879, the work was completed and the passage through the mountains was lauded and celebrated as this incredible architectural marvel.

Of course, the actual workers and the backbreaking labor that went into it was unmentioned as usual.

Unfortunately, that very day there was a major cave-in in that tunnel, in the Swannanoa Tunnel, and 20 men died.

This gave rise to a folk song called the “Swannanoa Tunnel”, which itself followed a path that many songs in American culture follow, where it starts in black culture, and it talks about a very real event that happened.

And then over the years, it starts to dissipate.

It starts to travel.

And then when the recording industry comes in, all of a sudden it's a white bluegrass song, and the black origins of it have been completely forgotten.

A few years ago, I discovered an article online at The Bitter Southerner by Kevin Kehrberg and Jeffrey Keith, and it was entitled “Somebody Died, Babe”.

This long, in-depth article chronicled their journey discovering the real h.. behind the song “Swannanoa Tunnel”, also known as “..

I was taken with their impeccable scholarship and their just burning desire to to chase the origin of this song, to keep peeling back layers, and to keep digging deeper and deeper into American history until they found the only surviving recording of this song by an African-American singer, Will Love.

And they discovered that far from the the white bluegrass standard that it had become, that it had a totally different origin story.

And that origin story is directly connected .. in the Swannanoa Tunnel that happened the day that that route was completed.

[Will Love sings] “Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel, all caved in, babe all caved in” And I listened to that recording and I was really.. by the sound of Will Love's voice, by the way that he hit the table, you know, to emulate the sound of the pickax of the workers.

And there was just something otherworldly that was beyond, you know, the old recording equipment and, you know, how old it was, but was just in his voice and connecting to an actual history.

And it really inspired me because at this time, I was in the earliest stages of my formulation of the idea of the railroad project for the Silk Road Ensemble.

And it became sort of a talisman for me as I went through.

And the project started to develop and bringing everybody in and it becoming this incredibly beautiful, multilayered, complex project that it is now.

But the Swannanoa Tunnel kept calling and it kept wanting to be a part of the whole thing.

And so when we got to the actual performance, we got to putting it together on stage, the “Swannanoa Tunnel” was a through line.

And so I sang it, different people played it, different groups within the larger group played the tune and developed it into something.

And it didn't matter who did it or sang it or played it, it always sounded amazing and it always spoke and said something, which is what best folk songs do.

So now I want to share with you “Swannanoa Tunnel” Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel, all caved in, babe, all caved in Last December I remember wind blowed cold, babe wind blowed cold When you hear my watch dog howling somebody’s round, babe, somebody’s round When you hear that hoot owl squalling somebody’s died, babe, somebody’s died Hammer falling from my shoulder all day long, babe, all day long I’m going back to Swannanoa Tunnel that’s my home, babe, that’s my home [instrumental version begins] [Will Love sings] Asheville Junction, Swannanoa Tunnel, all caved in, babe, all caved in Last December I remember wind blowed cold, babe wind blowed cold When you hear my watch dog howling somebody’s round, babe, somebody’s round When you hear that hoot owl squalling somebody’s died, babe, somebody’s dead