“Nine Pound Hammer” belongs to a family of hammer and work songs that shared verses. These songs grew up among the work crews, many of them Black convict laborers, in the railroad, mining and construction camps of the South, and white musicians picked many of them up. The folk-song index gives it the same Roud number, 4299, as “Take This Hammer.” A fragment collected in Texas in 1891 already has the line “roll on Johnnie, you rolls too slow.” In 1923 a man wrote to the Library of Congress that he had heard a “roll on buddy” verse in railroad and construction camps in West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee. Dorothy Scarborough’s On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925) was the first to print a version under the title “Nine-Pound Hammer.”
The first commercial record came from Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters (also known as the Hill Billies). They recorded it in New York for Brunswick on 13 May 1927, and the record carries the “roll on buddy” chorus. Their fiddler Charlie Bowman later told the folklorists Archie Green and Ed Kahn that the band had put the song together in the studio from whatever pieces they could remember. On 17 February 1936, at their first session in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Monroe Brothers recorded it as “Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy.” Charlie Monroe sang lead and Bill Monroe tenor, and Bluebird issued it as B-6422 with “My Long Journey Home.”
Merle Travis, born in Rosewood, Kentucky, in 1917, recorded “Nine Pound Hammer” on 8 August 1946 at Radio Recorders in Hollywood, with Cliffie Stone on bass and Lee Gillette producing. It was the first title of Folk Songs of the Hills, a Capitol set of four 78s issued in June 1947. “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon” came from the same session. His reworking is probably what kept the song in circulation. The coal is in it: in the version Tony Rice recorded, the singer asks how he can pull a load of coal when the wheels won’t roll, and complains it’s a long way to Harlan and to Hazard just to get a little brew.
Bluegrass bands drew on Travis’s version. Bill Monroe sang it on 10 November 1961 for Bluegrass Ramble (Decca, 1962). Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs recorded it on 21 March 1962 for Folk Songs of Our Land (Columbia), crediting Travis. Jim & Jesse cut it in June 1963 for Bluegrass Classics (Epic). Tony Rice recorded it twice: on Guitar (King Bluegrass, 1974) with J. D. Crowe on banjo, and on Manzanita (Rounder, 1979) with Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Todd Phillips.
