“John Hardy” is an anonymous murder ballad about real events in McDowell County, West Virginia. John Hardy was a Black railroad worker. In the spring of 1893, at Shawnee Coal Camp (later called Eckman) near Keystone, he shot Thomas Drews after a quarrel over a game of craps. A newspaper report of the time said Hardy drew his pistol and demanded back money he had lost to Drews, and fired after Drews had repaid only part of it. It added that the two men were rivals for the same woman. Hardy was convicted at the October term of court and hanged at Welch on 19 January 1894, before a crowd reported at three thousand. He had been baptised in the river that morning. On the scaffold he blamed whiskey for his downfall and said he had made his peace with God.
The ballad probably began in McDowell County but soon spread beyond the state. Within two decades of the hanging, variants had been published in North Carolina and Kentucky as well as West Virginia. As it travelled, its story became tangled with that of John Henry, the steel-driving hero of another ballad. In 1925 John Harrington Cox’s Folk-Songs of the South printed nine versions that treated the two as the same man. Louis Watson Chappell’s John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study later separated the heroic steel driver from the outlaw and murderer. John and Alan Lomax, Cecil Sharp, Marie Boette and Pat Gainer all wrote down tunes for the song.
Most sung versions follow the same outline. Hardy is a desperate man who carries his guns every day. He shoots a man on the West Virginia line and runs for the Virginia side, where a marshal arrests him. His woman, dressed in blue, promises to stay true to him, and the last verse takes him to the hanging ground.
The earliest known recording is Eva Davis’s for Columbia in 1924. Ernest Stoneman recorded it in Asheville, North Carolina, on 27 August 1925, and OKeh issued it on a twelve-inch disc (OKeh 7011) with “The Wreck on the C & O.” Buell Kazee sang it with his banjo in New York on 19 April 1927 (Brunswick 144, coupled with “Roll On, John”). The Carter Family recorded it as “John Hardy Was a Desperate Little Man” at Victor’s Camden, New Jersey, studio on 10 May 1928, and Victor released it in December 1929 (V-40190). Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Earl Scruggs and the Kingston Trio also recorded it.
Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys recorded it as an instrumental on 4 December 1961 in Nashville, with Tony Ellis on banjo and Bobby Joe Lester on fiddle, for the 1962 Decca album Bluegrass Ramble. Tony Rice sang it on Cold on the Shoulder (Rounder 0183, 1984), recorded in January 1983 at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California, with Sam Bush on mandolin, Béla Fleck on banjo, Vassar Clements on fiddle, Jerry Douglas on Dobro and Todd Phillips on bass.
