John Henry

The story

John Henry is an American folk hero, a Black freedman said to have been a "steel-driving man": with a hammer he drove a steel drill into rock to make holes for the explosives that blasted out railroad tunnels. According to the legend, his strength was measured in a race against a steam-powered rock drill. He won the race, but died in victory with the hammer in his hand, his heart giving out from the strain. A real hammerman worked with a "shaker", who held and turned the drill against the rock, but the tale seldom mentions him, and some retellings turn John Henry into a worker driving spikes into railway track.

Where and whether it happened has long been argued. In the late 1920s the sociologist Guy Benton Johnson investigated the legend at the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway's Big Bend Tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia, built from 1870 to 1872 by his dating, which some versions of the song name. In 1927 he found a man, Neal Miller, who said he had carried water and drills there as a boy of 17, had seen John Henry every day, and had watched the contest, after which John Henry fell sick and died. The railway's chief engineer, C. W. Johns, replied that no steam drills had ever been used in that tunnel and that the papers of the period had been destroyed by fire. Johnson concluded that a case could be made either for or against Big Bend. Other places suggested for the contest are the Lewis Tunnel in Virginia and the Coosa Mountain Tunnel in Alabama.

In Steel Drivin' Man (2006) the historian Scott Reynolds Nelson described prison records of the Virginia Penitentiary for a 19-year-old African American, recorded as John Henry, John W. Henry or John William Henry, who had been arrested and tried for burglary. In those years the penitentiary hired out its prisoners to private contractors, many of them arrested on trivial charges, and this John Henry led the first group of convicts sent to tunnel work on the C&O Railway. Nelson found the company's tunnelling records, believed lost to fire, and argued that the contest took place 40 miles away at the Lewis Tunnel, between Talcott and Millboro, where prisoners worked beside steam drills night and day. He read the ballad's verses about the burial as meaning that John Henry was buried in a ditch behind the so-called white house of the Virginia State Penitentiary, a building painted white in photographs of the time, where many unmarked graves have been found; the prison's records of John William Henry stop in 1873. By Nelson's account the real John Henry was born in 1848 in New Jersey and died of silicosis, the lung disease caused by the dust of drilling and blasting, rather than of exhaustion, and he stands for the many hundreds of convict labourers who died in the mountains or soon after.

The story has been sung in two kinds of song. The ballad, usually sung at an upbeat tempo, typically tells of a childhood premonition that steel-driving would kill him, the race against the steam hammer, his death and burial, and his wife's grief. The "hammer songs", work songs sung slowly with a beat like the swing of a hammer, use his death as a warning. Nelson explains that workers set a pace, a "stint", for their labour and shunned men who broke it: the song told what happened to men who worked too fast, so a man sang slowly, worked slowly and guarded his life. Scholars disagree over whether the ballad grew out of the hammer songs or the two were always separate, and some songs and early studies confuse John Henry with John Hardy, a West Virginian outlaw.

John Henry became a symbol for labour movements and the Civil Rights Movement. The philosopher Jeanette Bicknell called him a symbol of strength and endurance, of exploited labour, of human dignity against the machine age, and of racial pride and solidarity; during World War II the United States government used his image as a symbol of social tolerance and diversity. Roark Bradford's novel John Henry (1931) carried the legend beyond railroad and mining communities and became a stage musical in 1940 with Paul Robeson in the title role. The song has been recorded by many artists of different backgrounds, and in 1996 the US Postal Service put John Henry on a stamp of American folk heroes.

What it says

The ballad tells the life of a steel-driving man who pits his hammer against a steam drill, wins, and dies of the effort, and it ends with his burial and his wife's mourning. It is a song of pride in human strength and skill against the machine. The slower hammer songs turn the same story into a warning to working men not to labour themselves to death.

The words

The words of this song are in the public domain, but no free, reliable edition of them has been found yet to import them from, and the Institute never types a song’s words from memory. “What it says” above tells what they are about.