Jimmy Forrest: Night Train

In 2006, the Recording Academy inducted this track into its Grammy Hall of Fame as a Jazz Single, but only because they had no Stripper Songs category. Neither as corny as "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody" nor as tacky as "Harlem Nocturne," Jimmy Forrest's "Night Train" generates more reverb than a steam locomotive thrusting through a long tunnel (nothing Freudian implied). We haven't heard such coarse, vulgar honking since the time Mother mistook exit road for onramp leaving a truck stop. (Mom drove long-haul freight.) If those rude truckers had seen her old strip-tease runway act, though, they'd have whistled a different tuneprobably "Night Train." Whew!