If you, like me, grew up singing "Charlie on the MTA" in school or at camp, you might be interested to know about Charlie's political past:
The character was conceived not as the hapless schlub immortalized in the Kingston Trio song but as a working-class hero ground down by big business and the two-party system.
The song popularized by the trio, memorized by Romney, and celebrated by the MBTA is actually a sanitized version of the original, a campaign song for a 1949 Boston mayoral candidate who opposed the subway fare hike. But by 1959, the candidate had been blacklisted and run out of town, and the song’s most political lyrics were simply edited out.
The T is just now beginning to tell that backstory — what Richard A. Davey, general manager of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, called the “important history" of a song known informally as “Charlie on the MTA." It encompasses both the birth of the modern transit system and the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War.
Like so many Bostonians who grew up with the song, Davey had never heard the lines in which Charlie says he is "sore and disgusted and...absolutely busted," or in which a conductor expresses sympathy for Charlie’s plight. That’s because the clean-cut Kingston Trio cut the lyrics to avoid causing trouble, wary of the blacklisted fate of the Weavers, folk artists they admired. They changed the final stanza to plug a made-up candidate named George O’Brien, instead of the real Walter A. O’Brien — a labor organizer and Progressive Party activist whose politics made him a target of the Massachusetts Commission on Communism in the mid-1950s.
The original lyrics and the song's history are now being displayed in several Boston T stops.