Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2010 November 20

Welcome to the Wikipedia Entertainment Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 20

Johnny Cash and trains

I've just recently started getting into the music of Johnny Cash and I notice that like 1/4 of his songs seem to either be about trains or contain railway-related imagery. I don't actually know a huge amount about the man's life... what's the deal with this, was he one of those railfan/trainspotting types in his spare time? --Kurt Shaped Box (talk) 00:44, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

I'm surprised we don't have an article about it (I can't find one), but there is a subgenre of American roots music called something like "train music" or "railroad music". Johnny Cash comes from that tradition; he was not unique in that regard. Aside from "train standards" like Rock Island Line and Man of Constant Sorrow and Big Rock Candy Mountain, many acts which liked to reference American folk music had their own train songs. Besides Johnny Cash, which you note, lots of the British Rock and Roll bands of the 1960s had their own train songs, simply because they were well steeped in the American tradition. The Beatles had "One After 909" and the Yardbirds had their cover of "Train Kept A-Rollin'." Johnny Cash was more of a fan of traditional American music, and was doing his part of popularizing train music as a fan of the musical tradition probably moreso than as a fan of trains, per se. --Jayron32 01:11, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Nice. Welcome to the world of Cash. Check out Walk the Line for a hollywood version of his life, but the real one was far more complex. I could drop a ton of links. Johnny Cash, The Wanderer (U2 song) 10draftsdeep (talk) 03:07, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Also see: List of train songs. Pepso2 (talk) 16:08, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

A lot of Cash's early work, whether it was specifically about trains or not, had a rhythm that could remind you of a train. Hence June Carter's comment to and about him in Walk the Line: "Sharp as a razor, and steady as a freight train," or something like that. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:14, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

dudesnude

i need to find out how many users dudesnude has so that i can cite it. and more sources on dudesnude in general, any help?Hemanetwork (talk) 21:13, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Try emailing the website's staff. Y2Kcrazyjoker4 (talk • contributions) 23:57, 20 November 2010 (UTC)

Actually that won't work - as far as I can recall we don't allow self-published figures for social network sites - it has to be sourced to a reliable third party source. Exxolon (talk) 04:17, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

That said, if you're having trouble finding sources for info, the owners of the site will likely know exactly who has written about them. Dismas|^(talk) 04:24, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

You can say, "According to the website, it has xxxx members". Corvus cornix_talk 20:29, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I did a quick Alexa search, and the site is somewhat popular. I think Alexa only provides tracking information for the top 100,000 websites, and this one came in around #7700, give or take (by comparison, Wikipedia itself is #7 worldwide and #6 in the United States). Not sure how reliable Alexa is considered for such a citation, though. --McDoobAU93 21:02, 21 November 2010 (UTC)