Song Lyrics

Listen all you children to my sad refrain
About a subway conductor on a runaway train
Squeezing people into cars, he won his fame
And John Charles Cohen was the great man's name

J. C. Cohen, what a great conductor
IRT that's a subway line
And if you gotta travel uptown
He's a greater conductor than Leonard Bernstein

'Twas on a Sunday in the summer and from everywhere
People planned to take a subway to the World's Fair
A half a million people tried to push and jar
All of them determined to get in one car

But the IRT depended on their finest men
J. C. Cohen could pack a subway like a sardine can
He pushed the people up and back and 'round about
He squeezed so many in he squeezed the engineer out

J. C. Cohen, what a great conductor
How he'd moan, step to the rear
J. C. Cohen, he really had a problem
On a subway train without an engineer

J. C. tried to get into the engineer's place
But when he look inside the cab, he saw a strange man's face
A half pint drunk with a full pint bottle
He emptied out the bottle and he yelled, full throttle

They passed Columbus Circle doing 82
A couple minutes later they were under Bronx Zoo
J. C. shuddered and he said, "I guess
This used to be a local but it's now an Express"

J. C. Cohen, what a great conductor
Kept his head when everyone was tense
He said, "When we pass the city limits
Everybody pays another fifteen cents"

J. C. said, "We're heading north, my friends
But not a man alive knows where the subway ends"
The train went under Albany at 90 flat
And Governor Rockefeller hollered, "What was that?"

A lady said to J. C. Cohen with indignation
"If this is Albany then you have passed my station
So either you should take me back to fifty ninth Street
Or ask one of these gentlemen to give me his seat"

J. C. Cohen, what a great conductor
J. C. Cohen noticed something odd
When he saw lobsters on the roadbed
He said, "I got a feeling we're beneath Cape Cod"

Oh well, the train kept speeding to the north my friends
Finally came to where the tunnel ends
When they came up to the surface from the long, long hole
They were twenty seven inches from the great North Pole

J. C. hollered, "Everybody out
This is the end of the line beyond the shadow of a doubt"
They went out to get some fresh air and before they took a whiff
Cohen and all the passengers were frozen stiff

J. C. Cohen, what a great conductor
Bless his soul, he ran out of luck
J. C. Cohen, he was really frozen
And he had to be brought home in a Good Humor truck

When they told Mrs. Cohen that she'd lost her man
She said, "Must you interrupt me when I'm playing Pan?"
Then she said to her partner, Mrs. R. J. Rosen
"Cohen was a lovely husband but he's no good frozen"

Then she went to her little boy and took his hand
And she said, "I'm going to take you out to Disneyland
So Melvin, little darling, don't you weep or wail
'Cause you got another papa on the monorail"
Got another papa on the monorail

Busch Lou, Allan Sherman, Lou Busch

The duration of J.C. Cohen is 4:49 minutes and seconds.