Title: 'City of New Orleans' Writer Steve Goodman's Final Albums Reissued - Rolling Stone
Headings: ‘City of New Orleans’ Writer Steve Goodman to Be Celebrated on Deluxe Album Reissues
‘City of New Orleans’ Writer Steve Goodman to Be Celebrated on Deluxe Album Reissues
Folk-country singer died at 36 in 1984, just prior to the release of his album ‘Affordable Art’
The final two albums by "City of New Orleans" songwriter Steve Goodman will be reissued in deluxe editions.

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Available July 19th on Omnivore Recordings, Artistic Hair, a live compilation first released in 1983, and 1984’s Affordable Art will be supplemented by a total of 17 previously unheard bonus tracks. Among the highlights are three cuts celebrating Goodman’s lifelong allegiance to baseball, and more specifically, his beloved Chicago Cubs, with the comical “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,” a 1984 bonus track, “Go Cubs Go,” originally released as a single for WGN Radio, and his own rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Among the most acclaimed Goodman compositions, two are considered modern folk-country classics. “ City of New Orleans,” a quintessential train song recorded for his 1971 debut album, became a Top 20 pop hit the following year for Arlo Guthrie. When Willie Nelson rode his version to the top of the country chart in 1984, it earned the songwriter a posthumous Grammy for Best Country Song. With uncredited assistance from Prine, Goodman crafted “You Never Even Call Me by My Name,” a cut from his self-titled debut LP for the Buddah label in 1971. The track would later become a Top 10 country hit for controversial outlaw performer David Allan Coe, who released it with a somewhat altered title, using the past-tense of “call,” and inserted a spoken epilogue suggesting that he talked Goodman into adding the litany of country-themed clichés to the final verse — mama, drinking, prison, trains, trucks — to turn the tune into “the perfect country song.” But according to author Clay Eals’ entertaining and exhaustive biography Steve Goodman: Facing the Music (2007, ECW Press), although Coe’s 1975 hit version was the first to incorporate the comical coda on record, the singer’s recollection of events is either “faulty or fabricated.”