"Chattanooga Choo Choo" is a big-band/swing song which was
featured in the 1941 movie
Sun Valley Serenade, which starred Sonja Henie, John
Payne, Glenn Miller and his orchestra, The Modernaires, Milton
Berle and Joan Davis. It was performed in the film as an
extended production number, featuring vocals by Tex Beneke,
Paula Kelly, and the Modernaires followed by a production
number showcasing Dorothy Dandridge and an acrobatic dance
sequence by The Nicholas Brothers. This was the #1 song across
the United States on December 7, 1941. The Glenn Miller
recording, RCA Bluebird B-11230-B, was no.1 for nine weeks on
the Billboard Best Sellers chart.
The 78-rpm commercial version of the song 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
sales of 1,200,000. The transcription of this award ceremony
can be heard on the first of three volumes of RCA's "Legendary
Performer" compilations on Glenn released by RCA in the 1970s.
In the early 1990s a two-channel recording of a portion of the
Sun Valley Serenadesoundtrack 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.
Today, trains have 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, but in 2009 joining the
Historic Hotels of America, 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 the
"Dinner in the Diner" which is the complex's fine dining venue,
housed in a restored 1941 Class A dining car. The city's other
historic station, Union Station, parts of which predated the
Civil War, was demolished in 1973; its 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, which is in the suburb of East
Chattanooga.
The reputation given to the city by the song also lent
itself to making Chattanooga the home of the National Model
Railroad Association. In addition, the athletic mascot of the
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is a rather
menacing-looking anthropomorphized mockingbird named Scrappy,
who is dressed as a railroad engineer and is sometimes depicted
at the throttle of a steam locomotive.
The
Dixie Flyeroriginally was a named train that did pass
through and stop in Chattanooga on its run from Chicago to
Miami. That railroad, until 1957 was the Nashville, Chattanooga
and St. Louis Railway (NC&StL). The NC&StL was merged
into L&N in 1957. Now it is part of CSX.
The
Southern Crescentdid not go through Chattanooga, but
there were at least three other Southern Railway trains that
ran through Chattanooga direct to Washington and on to New York
without changing trains.
The train would not have gone through North Carolina,
although the lyrics say "dinner in the diner, nothing could be
finer than to have your ham 'n' eggs in Carolina." This longer
route via Salisbury and Asheville was all on Southern rails
from Washington, DC on southwest.
Cab Calloway and His Orchestra recorded a cover version of
"Chattanooga Choo Choo" on the Conqueror record label in 1941
as Conqueror 9914.
Bill Haley & His Comets released a cover of "Chattanooga
Choo Choo" as an Essex 45 single in 1954 as Essex 348.
In 1967, 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 while spending two weeks at
#1 on the Easy Listening chart (which would later be renamed
the Adult Contemporary chart).
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, the big value bar."
A cover by Steve Lucky & The Rhumba Bums featured in the
film "Be Cool" (2005).
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 second, created by the
German rock musician Udo Lindenberg in 1983 became very popular
because of its political implications. The ironic text of this
song
Sonderzug nach Pankow("Special Train To Pankow")
appealed personally to GDR's Chairman of the Council of State
Erich Honecker. Therefore, the song was widely propagated
(though forbidden) in East Germany, it is now considered an
early contribution towards the fall of the Berlin Wall.