Did He Ever Return?: The Forgotten Story of "Charlie and the M.T.A."

On a clear, chilly day in November 2004, Massachusetts' then-governor Mitt Romney stood inside a large white tent set up on the plaza outside Boston City Hall. He was there to sing a song—something he did with gusto as he joined the Kingston Trio in a rousing rendition of "M.T.A.," the well-known ballad about a "man named Charlie" doomed to "ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston" and become "the man who never returned." The purpose of this unusual concert was to launch the "Charlie Card," an electronic fare card that replaced tokens on the Boston subway system.¹

Romney said he had wanted to sing that song in public "since about the fifth grade." This isn't surprising because, since the Kingston Trio's hit recording of the song in 1959, "M.T.A." has become a part of American culture, recorded by other performers, reprinted in myriad songbooks, and sung at countless summer camps. There are now at least fifty versions of the song on YouTube by professional and amateur performers, including versions from Ireland and Denmark. In 1996 the conservative magazine National Review included "M.T.A." in its tongue-in-cheek list of the 100 "most conservative rock songs" because of its opposition to "a burden-some tax on the population in the form of a subway fare increase." In 2007 the Boston Pops performed "M.T.A." as part of its annual July 4 concert on the Esplanade. With a different cast of performers, the Kingston Trio continues to tour and "M.T.A." is one of their most-requested songs.²

As Norm Cohen puts it, "A sure indicator of a song's popularity is the occurrence of parodies," which assumes that the audience is familiar with the song and thus understands the spoof.³ "M.T.A." has been frequently parodied, including versions about library budget cuts, issues of low pay for working women, the Bush-Gore vote count controversy in Florida, the Boston Red Sox trading Manny Ramirez to the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the London subway system.⁴ In 1998 a "Celtic punk" group from Boston, the Dropkick Murphys, recorded a takeoff called "Skinhead on the M.T.A." A minister in Oklahoma used the song as the basis of a sermon, asking whether Jesus, like Charlie, would ever return.⁵

Another validation of the song's cultural importance is how its central idea has become a symbol for people stuck in difficult situations with no obvious hope in sight. In 2004, for example, an essayist for the New York Times described his fear of visiting "alienating" and "forbidding" Boston: "For me the primal experience of Boston dread has less to do with shame and guilt than traffic and transit—the automotive equivalent of the eternal torment of Charlie on the M.T.A." Also that year, a Christian Science Monitor reporter expressed concern that out-of-town visitors to Boston during that summer's Democratic Party convention would be unable to get around the city:

For now, fuddled first-time visitants are stuck in the Kafka-esque underground gulag singing a broken-record refrain from the 1950s hit of the Kingston Trio ("Charlie and the M.T.A."): "Well, did he ever return? … No, he never returned, and his fate is still unlearned … He may ride forever 'neath the streets of Boston, he's the man who never returned."

In 2008 an op-ed columnist for the Washington Post warned that the increased screening at airports as part of the war on terror was victimizing many innocent travelers. He wrote: "Thousands of 'misidentified' travelers like me who are caught in the watch-list dragnet, like 'Charlie on the M.T.A.,' can't wait for the implementation of the TSA's Secure Flight program."⁶

Most people think of "M.T.A." as a clever, amusing ditty—a novelty song like others of the postwar era, such as "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" and "How Much Is That...