National Casey Day

Wallace Saunders, a Black engine wiper at the Illinois Central roundhouse in Canton, Mississippi, cleaned the wrecked locomotive and wrote the first song about the man who had driven it. In 1909 two vaudevillians, T. Lawrence Siebert and Eddie Newton, copyrighted their own version, which the Tennessee Encyclopedia says became the basis for more than two hundred later ones.

The songs were not careful with him. Jones avoided saloons and was a faithful husband, and the hit version made him a hard-drinking rounder. In 1938 his widow published "Casey Jones, My Husband" as a rejoinder.

None of this made Casey a common American first name for a long time. It first reached the Social Security Administration's five-a-year reporting floor in 1888, dropped off the list again the following year, and hovered near that floor for decades. It did not enter the top 100 boys' names until 1978.

Where National Casey Day itself came from, nobody wrote down. No founder, no organisation and no announcement can be traced, and no source explains June 16. What the day has instead is a name with an unusually long paper trail, from an Old Irish adjective to a Kentucky town to an American birth file that begins in 1880.