John Henry

USPS 1996 John Henry stamp

John Henry is an American mythical (usually African-American) folk hero, who has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels.

In the late 1800s, as the country recovered from the Civil War, railroad tracks began to stitch the nation together. This made it possible to go from ocean to ocean in under a week, where it might have earlier taken up to six months. Among the men that built the railroads, John Henry stands tall, broad shoulders above the rest. Little can be said for certain about the facts of John Henry's life, but his tale has become the stuff of myth. He has embodied the spirit of growth in America for over a century. But his legacy cannot be solely summed up in the image of a man with a hammer, a former slave representing the strength and drive of a country in the process of building itself. Something within his story established John Henry as a fixture of the popular imagination. He has been the subject of novels, a postage stamp and even animated films. Above all, "John Henry" is the single most well-known and often-recorded American folk song.

Though the story of John Henry sounds like the quintessential tall tale, it is certainly based, at least in part, on historical circumstance. There are disputes as to where the legend originates. Some place John Henry in West Virginia, while recent research suggests Alabama. Still, all share a similar back-story.

In order to construct the railroads, companies hired thousands of men to smooth out terrain and cut through obstacles that stood in the way of the proposed tracks. One such chore that figures heavily into some of the earliest John Henry ballads is the blasting of the Big Bend Tunnel -- more than a mile straight through a mountain in West Virginia.

Steel-drivin' men like John Henry used large hammers and stakes to pound holes into the rock, which were then filled with explosives that would blast a cavity deeper and deeper into the mountain. In the folk ballads, the central event took place under such conditions. Eager to reduce costs and speed up progress, some tunnel engineers were using steam drills to power their way into the rock. According to some accounts, on hearing of the machine, John Henry challenged the steam drill to a contest. He won, but died of exhaustion, his life cut short by his own superhuman effort.

Folk researcher Stephen Wade writes that the song was born from the work of driving steel. "In the years before the song became known to the greater American public, it remained in folk possession," he explains. "Black songsters and white hillbilly musicians approached 'John Henry' equipped with a wealth of regional and personal styles." Not surprisingly, the songs caught on and spread to a wider audience. Country music legend Merle Travis heard one version at an early age.

"Ever since I been big enough to remember hearing anybody sing anything at all, I believe I've heard that old song about the strong man that hammered hisself to death on the railroad," Travis said. "There's been dozens and dozens of different tales about where John Henry comes from."

The story of John Henry seems to have spoken to just about everyone who heard it, which probably accounts for why the ballad became so popular. And as the songs started to become more popular, the legend of the man grew to even larger proportions. But whatever exaggeration of deed may have ensued, an element of truth rings through.

John Cephas is a blues musician from Virginia. "It was a story that was close to being true," he says. "It's like the underdog overcoming this powerful force. I mean even into today when you hear it (it) makes you take pride. I know especially for black people, and for other people from other ethnic groups, that a lot of people are for the underdog."

Today, John Henry's legend has grown beyond the songs that helped make him famous. "Though John Henry most often appears in song," notes Wade, "he has been depicted in numerous graphic mediums ranging from folk sculpture to fine art lithography, book illustration to outdoor sculpture." This art approaches the man himself in several different ways, sometimes placing him in a historically realistic perspective and focusing on his work and life, sometimes deifying him. One 1945 illustration by James Daugherty shows John Henry as a defense worker, supported by other famous black Americans such as Joe Louis and George Washington Carver.

"Over the years," Wade continues, "labor lore scholar Archie Green has researched what he calls 'the visual John Henry.' It's from his work that these illustrations come, touching, variously, the realms of fine, popular and folk art."

Thanks to these works of art, the story of John Henry reaches a new audience that, today, may not be familiar with the songs that gave rise to the legend. Wherever people discover John Henry, his influence promises to hold strong.

Mythology

Like other "Big Men" such as Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Iron John, John Henry served as a mythical representation of a particular group within the melting pot of the 19th-century working class. In the most popular story of his life, Henry is born into the world big and strong. He grows to be one of the greatest "steel-drivers" in the mid-century push to extend the railroads across the mountains to the West. The complication of the story is that, as machine power continued to supplant brute muscle power (both animal and human), the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black driving crew. In a bid to save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the inventor to a contest: John Henry versus the steam hammer. John Henry wins, but in the process, he suffers a heart attack and dies.

In modern depictions John Henry is usually portrayed as hammering down rail spikes, but older songs instead refer to him driving blasting holes into rock, part of the process of excavating railroad tunnels and cuttings.

Historical basis

The truth about John Henry is obscured by time and myth, but one legend has it that he was a slave born in Alabama in the 1840s and fought his famous battle with the steam hammer along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Talcott, West Virginia. A statue and memorial plaque have been placed along a highway south of Talcott as it crosses over the tunnel in which the competition may have taken place.

The railroad historian Roy C. Long found that there were multiple Big Bend Tunnels along the C&O rail line. Also, the C&O employed multiple black men who went by the name "John Henry" at the time that those tunnels were being built. Though he could not find any documentary evidence, he believes on the basis of anecdotal evidence that the contest between man and machine did indeed happen at the Talcott, West Virginia site due to the presence of all three (a man named John Henry, a tunnel named Big Bend, and a steam-powered drill) at the same time at that place.

The part-time folklorist John Garst has argued that the contest instead happened at the Coosa Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and Western railroad (now part of Norfolk Southern) in Alabama in 1887. He conjectures that John Henry may have been a man named Henry born a slave to P. A. L. Dabney, the father of the chief engineer of that railroad, in 1844.

While he may or may not have been a real character, Henry became an important symbol of the working man. His story can be seen as an archetypically tragic illustration of the futility of fighting the technological progress so evident in the ongoing 19th century upset of traditional physical labor roles. Some labour advocates interpret the legend as saying that even if you are the most heroic worker of time-honored practices, management remains more interested in efficiency and production than in your health and well-being; though John Henry worked himself to death, they replaced him with a machine anyway. Thus the legend of John Henry has been a staple of leftist politics, labor organizing and American counter-culture for well over one hundred years.

References in popular culture

Songs

Songs featuring the story of John Henry have been sung by many blues, folk, and rock musicians, including Leadbelly (singing both "John Henry" and a variant entitled "Take This Hammer"), Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt (in his "Spike Driver Blues" variant of the song), Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, Johnny Cash (singing "The Legend of John Henry's Hammer"), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Fred McDowell, John Fahey (who plays both an instrumental of the original song, and an instrumental of his own, "John Henry Variation"), Harry Belafonte, Roberta Flack, Dave Van Ronk, and the Drive-By Truckers (singing "The Day John Henry Died"). Dave Dudley wrote his own variation called "John Henry". The Shane Daniel album Yours Truly contains a song called "The Spirit Of John Henry". Daniel says this song has to do with the name John Henry not being used in modern songs. Most recently, Bruce Springsteen performs "John Henry" with a folk band on his 2006 album We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions. It was translated into Norwegian as "Jon Henry" in 1973 by Odd Børretzen. Van Morrison recorded a rock version of the folk song on his Philospher's Stone album. In addition Henry Thomas also recorded a version of the song.

Disney film

In 2000, Walt Disney Feature Animation completed a short subject film based on John Henry, produced at the satellite studio in Orlando, Florida, directed by Mark Henn and produced by Steven Keller. Keller and Henn worked collaboratively with the Grammy Award winning group "The Sounds of Blackness" to create all new songs for the film. The film also featured the voice talent of actress Alfre Woodard. "John Henry" created a strong positive response around the animation community, won several film festivals both domestically and abroad, and was one of seven finalists for the 2001 academy awards in its category.

However, Disney was uneasy about releasing a short about a black folk hero created by an almost completely white production team, and aside from film festivals, industry screenings and limited theater screenings required for academy award consideration, a slightly cut down version of John Henry was released only as part of a video compilation entitled Disney American Legends in 2001. This became the nation's top-selling children's video for several weeks upon its release. Disney Educational Productions has also made the film available as a stand-alone product for video use in schools. And the film is often shown on The Disney Channel, especially during Black History Month.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGglKPqG16s

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SfAJ739rgg&feature=related

Other

Ø The legend of John Henry was the inspiration for the third version of the DC Comics superhero Steel -- also known as John Henry Irons.

Ø Colson Whitehead's 2001 novel John Henry Days uses the John Henry myth as story background.

Ø In 1994, They Might Be Giants released an album, John Henry.

Ø The story of John Henry was re-worked in a comic song by the songwriting duo The Smothers Brothers. In their version, John Henry takes on the steam hammer and is narrowly defeated, but ends saying 'I'm gonna get me a steam drill too!'

Ø Gillian Welch's song Elvis Presley Blues, from the album Time (The Revelator) (2001) compares Elvis Presley's death to John Henry's.

Ø Alt-Country legends Songs: Ohia released the song "John Henry Split My Heart" on their 2003 album, "The Magnolia Electric Co."

Ø Bart Simpson is forced to sing "John Henry Was a Steel Driving Man" in the Simpsons episode Homer's Odyssey.

Ø The Onion, a satirical newspaper, ran a fictional story in its February 27, 2006 issue about a modern-day John Henry. That article, titled "Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying to Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0," describes an accountant who tried to prepare a spreadsheet faster than the Microsoft program Excel. Much like the traditional John Henry, this protagonist won the contest but died afterward.

Ø In Julian Schnabel's 1996 film Basquiat, Benny (played by Benicio Del Toro) tells the story of John Henry to Jean-Michel Basquiat (Jeffrey Wright). At the end of the tale Basquiat replies "But he beat it".

In 1972, Michigan sculptor Charles Cooper completed this eight-foot bronze statue of John Henry. It stands in Memorial Park above the east portal of the Big Bend Tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia.	Most accounts have set the ballad of John Henry at the Big Bend Tunnel, near Talcott in Summers County. Originally called the Great Bend Tunnel, it was built between 1870-72 for the C & O Railroad.
The Coosa Tunnel -- one of two railroad tunnels built in 1887-88 for the Columbus & Western Railroad near Leeds, Ala., may have been the site of the events in the ballad. Photo: Fruits of Industry: Points and Pictures along the Central Railroad of Georgia by A. Pleasant Stovall and O. Pierre Havens, 1895.	In 1945, Indiana-born illustrator James Daugherty drew John Henry as a defence worker.