M.T.A.

For other uses, see MTA.

"M.T.A.", often called "The MTA Song", is a 1948 song written as "Charlie on the MTA" by Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes. The lyrics are about a man named Charlie trapped on Boston's subway system, then known as the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). The song was a 1959 hit when recorded and released by The Kingston Trio, an American folk group.

It has become so entrenched in Boston that the city's subway system named its electronic card-based fare collection system the "CharlieCard" as a tribute to this song.^[1]

Overview

The song's lyrics^[2] tell of Charlie, a man who gets aboard an MTA subway car. Charlie can't get off the subway as he didn't bring enough money for the "exit fares" that were established to collect an increased fare without upgrading existing fare collection equipment.

When he got there the conductor told him,

"One more nickel."

Charlie could not get off that train.

The song goes on to say that Charlie's wife is able to hand him a sandwich every day (but not, for some reason, a nickel) "as the train comes rumbling through."

The song is probably best known for its catchy chorus:

Did he ever return,

No he never returned

And his fate is still unlearn'd

He may ride forever

'neath the streets of Boston

He's the man who never returned.

After the third line of the chorus, in the natural break in the phrasing, audiences familiar with the song often call out "Poor Old Charlie!" or "What a pity!"

In the Kingston Trio recording, after the final chorus, the song's lead singer Nick Reynolds speaks the words: "Et tu, Charlie?", an echo of Julius Caesar's famous "Et tu, Brute?" ("You too, Brutus?")

History

The song, based on a much older version called "The Ship That Never Returned" (or its railroad successor, "Wreck of the Old 97"), is said to have been composed in 1948 as part of the election campaign of Walter A. O'Brien, a Progressive Party candidate for Boston mayor. As the story goes, O'Brien was unable to afford radio advertisements, so he enlisted local folk singers to write and sing songs from a touring truck with a loudspeaker (he was later fined $10 for "disturbing the peace").^[2][3]

According to this story, one of his major campaign planks was to lower the price of riding the subway by removing the complicated fare structure involving exit fares — so complicated that at one point it required a nine-page explanatory booklet. In the Kingston Trio recording, the name "Walter A. O'Brien" was changed to "George O'Brien," apparently to avoid risking protests that had hit an earlier recording, when the song was seen as celebrating a socialist politician.^[4]

Geography

The song has Charlie boarding at the Kendall Square station and changing for Jamaica Plain. Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood in Boston that was served by a streetcar line that terminated at Arborway (a reference to a road that passes the Arnold Arboretum), near present-day Forest Hills station. Service operated to Arborway until 1985, when the streetcar route was truncated to Heath Street at the northern edge of Jamaica Plain, today's Green Line "E" Branch. The "Charlie Card" depicts a fellow on a Green Line streetcar.

If his wife visited him every day at the Scollay Square station (now called Government Center), he must have been on what is now the Green Line (rapid transit lines in Boston were not color-coded until 1965). The Kendall Square station (now called Kendall/MIT) is in Cambridge on what is now the Red Line. His "change for Jamaica Plain" must have been at Park Street, where those two lines intersect.

Popular culture

• The computer scientist Henry Baker references the song in his paper CONS Should Not CONS Its Arguments, Part II: Cheney on the M.T.A., which describes a way of implementing Cheney's algorithm using C functions that, like Charlie, never return.
• In the MMORPG (video game), Aion, a quest exists in each city that will give you enough coin to get back to the mainland if you teleport to the city without sufficient coin for the return flight. On its webpages regarding the two quests, ZAM Network says, "If you spend your last Kinah getting to Pandaemonium or while in Pandaemonium, you can't get out without the teleport fee, like poor old Charlie."
• The song was featured in the Malcolm in the Middle episode "Long Drive" where Hal and his friends (in the musical group The Gentleman Callers) performed it multiple times.

Music

• The Chad Mitchell Trio song "Super Skier," written by Bob Gibson, used the tune and although its lyrics have nothing to do with subways, ends with a call to "get Charlie off the MTA."
• The Boston-based punk rock band Dropkick Murphys made a variation, "Skinhead on the MBTA", that featured a skinhead in the place of Charlie, on their 1998 album Do or Die.
• The Front Porch Country Band recorded a song called "The Man Who Finally Returned" about Charlie getting off the MTA.
• Bob Haworth, a member of The Kingston Trio, wrote and recorded a song called "MTA Revisited" in 2004.
• They Might Be Giants have a similar song about the New York subway called "Token Back to Brooklyn," a hidden track on their album Factory Showroom.
• Fred Small wrote and recorded a parody of Charlie on the MTA called Sergei in the Milky Way which humorously relates the true story of soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov who was temporarily stranded in space when the Soviet Union broke up. Small mimicked the Kingston Trio arrangement almost note for note.
• Frank Black sings "You can't get off your stop / Like old Charlie on the MTA" in his song "Living on Soul."
• Tamarac, a humorous folk duo from Boston's North Shore, performs the song and changes the words slightly: "And through the open window she throws Charlie a moon as the train goes rumbling through (what a bummer)."

Notes

External links

• Charlie on the MTA lyrics and history
• Boston Globe obituary of Bess Hawes
• Video with soundtrack of the Kingston Trio recording
• "Will Charlie Ever Get Off That Train?" by Peter Dreier and Jim Vrabel