King Solomon Hill - Legacy

Legacy

As of 2013, King Solomon Hill has eight known recordings:

• "Down on My Bended Knee" (Take 1)
• "Down on My Bended Knee" (Take 2)
• "The Gone Dead Train"
• "My Buddy Blind Papa Lemon"
• "Tell Me Baby"
• "Times Has Done Got Hard"
• "Whoopee Blues" (Take 1)
• "Whoopee Blues" (Take 2)

Otherwise, little evidence exists of his life outside of music, but he was noted as a heavy drinker. Hill died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Louisiana in 1949.

"The Gone Dead Train" was used as the title for a ninth-season episode of the television series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and actually is briefly played in the episode, along with mention of King Solomon Hill as the artist.

The 1969 film Performance, directed by Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell and starring Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, contained a song called "The Gone Dead Train", performed by Randy Newman. However, this is a rewrite by Jack Nitzsche and Russ Titelman and bears only a passing resemblance to "The Gone Dead Train" as performed by King Solomon Hill. As noted by rock critic Greil Marcus, the "dead train" in the Newman version is used as a metaphor for impotence. In Hill's original, the train appears to literally refer to an actual locomotive, which Hill referred to as a "Death Train."