Chattanooga Choo Choo (song)

"Chattanooga Choo Choo" is a song by Harry Warren (music) and Mack Gordon (words). It was recorded as a big-band/swing tune by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra and featured in the 1941 movie "Sun Valley Serenade". The song was an extended production number in the film. The Glenn Miller recording, RCA Bluebird B-11230-B, became the #1 song across the United States on December 7, 1941 and remained as #1 for nine weeks on the Billboard Best Sellers chart.

The song opens with a dialog between a passenger and a shoeshine man,


 * "Pardon me, boy, is that the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?"
 * "Track 29!"
 * "Boy, you can give me a shine."

At the time, shoeshine men, most of them African-American, were called "Boy", regardless of their age.

The 78-rpm was recorded on May 7, 1941 for RCA Victor's Bluebird label and became the first to be certified a gold disc on February 10, 1942, for 1,200,000 sales. The transcription of this award ceremony can be heard on the first of three volumes of RCA's "Legendary Performer" compilations released by RCA in the 1970s. In the early 1990s a two-channel recording of a portion of the Sun Valley Serenade soundtrack was discovered, allowing reconstruction of a true-stereo version of the film performance.

In 1996, the 1941 recording of "Chattanooga Choo Choo" by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

The song was written by the team of Mack Gordon and Harry Warren while traveling on the Southern Railway's Birmingham Special train. The song tells the story of traveling from New York City to Chattanooga. However, the inspiration for the song was a small, wood-burning steam locomotive of the 2-6-0 type which belonged to the Cincinnati Southern Railway, which is now part of the Norfolk Southern Railway system. That train is now a museum artifact (see below). From 1880, most trains bound for America's South passed through the southeastern Tennessee city of Chattanooga, often on to the super-hub of Atlanta. The Chattanooga Choo Choo did not refer to any particular train, though some have incorrectly asserted that it referred to Louisville and Nashville's Dixie Flyer or the Southern Railway's Crescent Limited.

Cover versions
Over the years, the song has been recorded by numerous artists, including Beegie Adair, The Andrews Sisters, Ray Anthony, Asleep at the Wheel, BBC Big Band, George Benson, John Bunch, Caravelli, Regina Carter, Ray Charles, Harry Connick, Jr., The Muppets, Ray Conniff, Ernie Fields, Stephane Grappelli & Marc Fosset, John Hammond, Jr., The Harmonizing Four, Harmony Grass, Ted Heath, Betty Johnson, Susannah McCorkle, Ray McKinley, Big Miller, Glenn Miller, Richard Perlmutter, Oscar Peterson, Elvis Presley, Spike Robinson, Harry Roy, Jan Savitt, Hank Snow, Teddy Stauffer, Dave Taylor, Claude Thornhill, The Tornados, and Guy Van Duser Other notable performances include:
 * Cab Calloway and His Orchestra recorded a cover version of "Chattanooga Choo Choo" on the Conqueror record label (Conqueror 9914) in 1941.
 * Carmen Miranda recorded a cover on July 25, 1942 and sang it in the movie Springtime in the Rockies.
 * Bill Haley & His Comets released a cover of "Chattanooga Choo Choo" as an Essex 45 single (Essex 348) in 1954.
 * Pianist Floyd Cramer recorded a single version on RCA Records in 1962.
 * UK instrumental group The Shadows recorded a version of the song for their album Dance With The Shadows which reached number two in the UK album charts in 1964.
 * The American musical group Harpers Bizarre released a cover version of the song "Chattanooga Choo Choo", which reached #45 on the U.S. pop chart and spent two weeks at #1 on the Easy Listening chart in 1967.
 * In 1978, the studio group Tuxedo Junction recorded a disco version that hit the American Top 40; it would peak at #32 pop and #18 on the Easy Listening chart.
 * Haruomi Hosono released a Japanese language cover of the song as the opening track on his 1975 album Tropical Dandy.
 * In the 1970s, the tune was used in the UK on an advert for Toffee Crisp candy bars, starting with "Pardon me, boy, is that a Toffee Crisp you chew chew," and ending with the final punch line "Chew chew Toffee crisp, and you'll go far."
 * A cover by Steve Lucky & The Rhumba Bums was featured in the 2005 film Be Cool.
 * The song's iconic intro was sampled by That Handsome Devil in their song "Damn Door" for their 2008 debut album "A City Dressed in Dynamite."
 * Barry Manilow recorded a version on the "Singin' With The Big Bands" album, 1994.
 * The arrangement which became the first gold record of all time was done by Jerry Gray.

Versions in German and Dutch
The tune was adopted twice for German songs. Both songs deal with trains, and both songs start with (different) translations of "pardon me".

The first was created and performed in 1947 by the German pop singer Bully Buhlan (Zug nach Kötzschenbroda). The lyrics are humorously describing the bother of a train ride out of post-war Berlin: no guarantee to arrive at destination due to coal shortage, passengers traveling on coach buffers, steps and roofs, never-ending trip interruptions including a night stop for delousing.

The second, Sonderzug nach Pankow, created by the German rock musician Udo Lindenberg in 1983 became very popular and had various political implications. Lindenberg was a West German singer and songwriter with a suitable fan community in East Germany. He had applied for years to tour the GDR but was rejected several times. The 1983 cover version of Chattanooga Choo Choo was directly asking the GDR's Chairman of the Council of State Erich Honecker for permission to hold a concert in the Palace of the Republic (Berlin). The song was released on February 2, 1983 and was repeatedly featured in the West as well in the East. The song itself and the Glenn Miller original were temporarily interdicted in the GDR. Nevertheless Lindenberg finally succeeded in getting an invitation to the GDR rock festival Rock for Peace on October 25, 1983. Honecker, a former brass band drummer of Rotfrontkämpferbund and Lindenberg exchanged presents in form of a leather jacket and a metal shawm in 1987. Lindenberg's success at passing the Inner German border peacefully with a humorous song gave him celebrity status as well as a positive political acknowledgement in both West and East Germany.

And the Andrew Sisters Lindenberg's version was adapted by Dutch singer Willem Duyn as De Eerste Trein Naar Zandvoort ("First train to Zandvoort") chronicling chaos and mayhem on the first seaside train (which he chooses to miss). It was a hit in the summer of 1983. Barry Manilow performed the song "Singin With The Big Bands" with Chattanooga Choo Choo's tune in 1994.

Legacy and popular culture
Today, trains have a pride of place in Chattanooga's former Terminal Station. Once owned and operated by the Southern Railway, the station was saved from demolition after the withdrawal of passenger rail service in the early 1970s, and it is now part of a 30-acre (12-hectare) resort complex, including the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hotel, and numerous historical railway exhibits. Hotel guests can stay in half of a restored passenger railway car. Dining at the complex includes the Gardens restaurant in the Terminal Station itself, The Station House (which is housed in a former baggage storage room and known for its singing waitstaff) and the "Dinner in the Diner" which is housed in a restored 1941 Class A dining car. The music venue "Track29" is also on the grounds of the Chattanooga Choo Choo hotel in the building that formerly housed the city's only ice rink at the back of the property. The city's other historic station, Union Station, parts of which predated the Civil War, was demolished in 1973; the site is now an office building housing the corporate offices of the Krystal restaurant chain. In addition to the railroad exhibits at "the Choo Choo", there are further exhibits at Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, in east Chattanooga.

The reputation given to the city by the song also has lent itself to making Chattanooga the home of the National Model Railroad Association since 1982. In addition, the athletic mascot of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga was, for a time, a rather menacing-looking anthropomorphized mockingbird named Scrappy, who was dressed as a railroad engineer and was sometimes depicted at the throttle of a steam locomotive.

"Chattanooga Choo Choo" has been performed in numerous TV shows, including several episodes of M*A*S*H, 1967 episodes of The Red Skelton Show and The Lawrence Welk Show, and a 2006 episode of Midsomer Murders.

In addition to TV shows, "Chattanooga Choo Cho"' has been sung in numerous movies, including the 1957 movie Peyton Place, the 1970 film Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1984 eponymous film Chattanooga Choo Choo, the 1988 films Big and Biloxi Blues, the 1998 film Babe: Pig in the City, and the 2005 film Be Cool.

In a notable example of the enduring popularity of the song, "Chattanooga Choo Choo" was performed by Kiss members Ace Frehley and Peter Criss in the 2002 Family Guy episode Road to Europe after Lois Griffin didn't know the lyrics to "Rock and Roll All Nite", causing Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley to walk off stage in the middle of the concert, allowing Frehley and Criss to perform the song.