Part of our Prison Songs project - see www.citiesandmemory.com/prisonsongs for full details.
Reimagined version of My Baby Got To Go by Marie Tueje.
"In contributing to the Prison Songs project my objective was to create a piece that retained the spirit of the source material whilst re-imagining for a contemporary context. Despite a radical re-working, an echo of despair and loneliness connect Alan Lomax’s1 My Baby Got To Go with the re-titled A Train Is Coming. This work was inspired by two themes; repetition and disruption, and the roots of this dichotomy were planted by chance. I was reading about the origins of the slogan ‘arbeit macht frei2 ’ (work sets you free) that appeared, notoriously, at the entrance to a number of Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. I learned that, in an apparent act of deliberate rebellion, prisoners who had to make the sign at Auschwitz I3 conspired to render the ‘b’ of the word arbeit upside down. I found the repetition of prison life
