John Henry

The hunt for a real John Henry began in the 1920s. The sociologist Guy B. Johnson of the University of North Carolina published John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend in 1929, and Louis W. Chappell of West Virginia University followed with John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study in 1933. Earlier collectors had treated the song as a variant of “John Hardy,” the ballad of a West Virginia outlaw; Chappell set out to show they were separate songs. Between them the two men gathered more than sixty versions, and most of the testimony they took pointed to the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Johnson looked at the C&O’s Big Bend Tunnel near Talcott, West Virginia, built from 1870 to 1872 by his dating. He was told by the railroad’s chief engineer that no steam drills had been used there, and concluded that a case could be made either way. In Steel Drivin’ Man (2006), the historian Scott Reynolds Nelson identified John William Henry, a Virginia Penitentiary convict leased to the C&O, and placed the contest at the Lewis Tunnel in Virginia, where prisoners worked beside steam drills. He read the ballad’s burial “by the white house” as the penitentiary’s white workhouse in Richmond. John Garst has argued instead for an Alabama steel driver, John Henry Dabney, who he says raced a steam drill at the Oak Tunnel on the Columbus and Western in 1887.

The earliest record on file is Fiddlin’ John Carson’s “John Henry Blues,” made in Atlanta in March 1924 for OKeh. The Williamson Brothers and Curry recorded “Gonna Die with My Hammer in My Hand” in 1927, a performance later compiled in the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). In the bluegrass era, Hylo Brown cut “John Henry” for Capitol in Nashville on 29 May 1957, at a session that also had Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and Capitol issued it in August 1958. The song has since been recorded by, among others, the Stanley Brothers, Reno and Smiley, the Lilly Brothers and Doc Watson.