Charlie rides the Boston subway forever because he cannot pay the extra nickel to get off. That is the whole plot of "Charlie on the MTA" — and behind the joke sits a real mayor's race, a real fare fight, a candidate who finished last, and a song that outlasted every politician in the story.
Boston is the most Irish-American big city in the United States, and this is its song by adoption. The candidate at the centre of it was an O'Brien, and the song's second life was sealed by Boston's Irish-American punk band, the Dropkick Murphys. It sits in our set as an Irish-American city song, the same way Body of an American does.
Boston, 1949: A Nickel Exit Fare and a Mayor's Race
In 1949, Boston's transit system — by then the Metropolitan Transit Authority — charged some riders an extra exit fare on top of the fare they had already paid. To working people, it was a tax on getting home.
Walter A. O'Brien, the Progressive Party candidate for mayor that year, campaigned against it, and his campaign had a song. Jacqueline Steiner and Bess Lomax Hawes wrote "Charlie on the MTA" for him: a ordinary working man, handed a sandwich by his wife as the train goes through the station, riding beneath the streets of Boston because he cannot raise the extra nickel to get off.
O'Brien could not afford radio advertising, so the campaign played its songs from a sound truck touring the city. He was fined $10 for disturbing the peace for doing it. He finished last in the election. But the song did its work anyway: it helped protesters gather roughly 100,000 signatures against the fare increase, and Charlie's ride became the argument everyone in Boston could hum.
The tune the song rides on is older than the campaign. It comes from "The Ship That Never Returned," the same melody family as "Wreck of the Old 97" — Charlie was set, deliberately, in the long American line of songs about men who never get home.
Why the Kingston Trio Sang ‘George’ O'Brien, Not Walter
The song became a national hit in 1959, when the Kingston Trio recorded it. By then, Walter O'Brien's politics were a problem for a commercial record: the Progressive Party had been branded communist-leaning in the McCarthy years, and naming its candidate could have cost the Trio airplay and bookings.
So the Trio changed one word. Their Charlie rides for "George O'Brien," a man who never existed. The fare, the wife, the sandwich and the eternal ride all stayed exactly the same — only the candidate's first name was scrubbed out.
The song travelled further than Boston in those years. When the Kingston Trio version became a hit, sympathisers as far away as Germany mailed nickels to the transit authority to free Charlie.
Skinhead on the MBTA: Dropkick Murphys Take Charlie Punk (1998)
Charlie's route into the Irish-American pub repertoire runs through one band. In 1998, the Dropkick Murphys — Boston's own Irish-American punk band, formed in the city's Irish working-class neighbourhoods — remade the song as “Skinhead on the MBTA.”
That recording is the bridge between a 1949 campaign song and the set list of a band like ours. The Dropkicks took Charlie out of the folk-revival world and put him in the Irish-American bar-band world, where he has stayed. Our post on Fairytale of New York tells the same kind of story for another city: a song about belonging to a place that is not Ireland, written by the children of people who left it.
2004: The Transit System Names Its Card After the Man It Trapped
The ending is the best part, and it is true. In 2004, Boston's transit authority — now the MBTA — introduced its reusable fare card and named it the CharlieCard, after the man its predecessor's fare policy had trapped underground. The Kingston Trio performed at the dedication, and Governor Mitt Romney attended.
The system that once fined a candidate $10 for singing about its fares now puts Charlie's name in every rider's wallet. Walter O'Brien lost his election and had his name taken out of his own song. Charlie never got off the train. He won anyway.
Want the full history? The MBTA's own article on Bess Lomax Hawes, the folklorist who co-wrote the song covers the campaign, the signatures, the Dropkick Murphys remake and the CharlieCard, and Wikipedia's M.T.A. (song) article traces the tune back to “The Ship That Never Returned.”
— hear us play it live (video above).