John Henry (folklore)

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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.

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 almost all stories, John Henry is a black man, however he served as a folk hero for both blacks and whites, representing the often painful changes entering the modern age in America

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.

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 labor 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.

Contents

[edit] Historicity

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.

In 2006 the Oxford University Press published "Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend", by Scott Reynolds Nelson, as associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary. Prof. Nelson tries to prove that John William Henry, a prisoner in Virginia leased by the warden to work on the C&O Railroad in the 1870s is the basis for the legendary John Henry. See book review in the New York Times, Oct. 18, 2006.

The railroad historian Roy C. Long found that there were multiple Big Bend Tunnels along the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Railway. 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.[1]

Retired chemistry professor and folklorist John Garst has argued that the contest instead happened at the Coosa Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and Western Railway (now part of Norfolk Southern) near Leeds, Alabama on September 20, 1887. Based on documentation that corresponds with the account of C. C. Spencer, who claimed in the 1920s to have witnessed the contest, Garst speculates that John Henry may have been a man named Henry who was born a slave to P. A. L. Dabney, the father of the chief engineer of that railroad, in 1844.[2] The city of Leeds is making plans to honor John Henry's legend with an exhibit in its Bass House historical museum and with a planned annual festival on the third Saturday of September. [3][4]

Though no documentary proof has emerged to rule out either theory, both Talcott and Leeds use their supposed connections with the legend in promotional and educational literature and events. Every year, on the weekend after the fourth of July, the town of Talcott hosts a celebration known as "John Henry Days." The weekend includes many yard sales, a parade, fireworks, and a rubber ducky race.

[edit] References in popular culture

[edit] 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, Pete Seeger, Big Bill Broonzy, Odetta, Johnny Cash (singing "The Legend of John Henry's Hammer"), Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Fred McDowell, John Renbourn, 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.[5] Van Morrison recorded a rock version of the folk song on his 1998 album The Philosopher's Stone. Henry Thomas also recorded a version of the song. Indie rock/Alt-country group Songs: Ohia released the song "John Henry Split My Heart" on their 2003 album Magnolia Electric Co., and fellow alt-country group Drive-By Truckers released the song "The Day John Henry Died" on their 2004 album The Dirty South.

[edit] 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, written by Shirley Pierce and produced by Steven Keller. Keller, Henn and Pierce 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.

[edit] Other

  • Henry is the subject of the 1931 Roark Bradford novel, John Henry. It was adopted into a a stage musical in 1940, starring Paul Robeson in the title role.
  • Colson Whitehead's 2001 novel John Henry Days uses the John Henry myth as story background.
  • In 1994, They Might Be Giants released an album, John Henry.
  • 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!'
  • Gillian Welch's song "Elvis Presley Blues," from the album Time (The Revelator) (2001), compares Elvis Presley's death to John Henry's.
  • Mark Knopfler's song "Song for Sonny Liston," from the album Shangri-La (Knopfler album) (2004), compares Sonny Liston's left jab to that of Henry's hammer.
  • The legend of John Henry was the inspiration for the third version of the DC Comics superhero Steel -- also known as John Henry Irons.
  • In the DC Comics mini-series "DC: The New Frontier", a black man takes on the name John Henry while donning a black hood secured by a hangmans noose and produces a sledge hammer in an attempt to avenge his murdered family by the Klu Klux Klan. He hides in a barn after being injured and a young white girl hollars "the n***ger's over here!". He is killed by the KKK. John Henry Irons is seen in the epilogue reading near John Henry's gravestone. This serves to further emotionally connect the the hero Steel and his namesake to the Silver Age folk hero.
  • John Henry's visage was used in the 2006 Transformers comic-book series, Evolutions: Hearts of Steel.
  • Bart Simpson is forced to sing "John Henry Was a Steel Driving Man" in the "Homer's Odyssey" episode of The Simpsons.
  • In the "Surf's Up" episode of The Cosby Show, after Theo Huxtable damages an apartment, Theo's mother blames Theo's father, Cliff, because Theo's actions were a recreation of events from a story which Cliff had told to Theo. Cliff does not accept that his telling Theo a story is reason that he should be blamed, and he defends himself by noting that he also once told Theo "the story of John Henry, who was a steel-drivin' man . . . [Theo] didn't go out and drive any steel!"
  • The Onion, a satirical newspaper, ran a fictional story in its February 27, 2006 issue about a modern-day John Henry. That article [1], 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.
  • 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".

[edit] See also

[edit] Other Big Men

Portal:Folklore
 Folklore Portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ Long, Roy C. (1991). "Big Bend Times". C&O History.
  2. ^ Garst, John (2002). "Chasing John Henry in Alabama and Mississippi: A Personal Memoir of Work in Progress". Tributaries: Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association 5: 92–129.
  3. ^ Thornton, William. "Leeds' plans for saluting Henry", 'Birmingham News', September 3, 2006. Retrieved on September 3, 2006.
  4. ^ Clowers, Don. "John Henry - Leeds connection doesn't exist", 'Leeds News', September 14, 2006. Retrieved on September 14, 2006.
  5. ^ Odd Børretzen & Alf Cranner. This is Music From Norway.
  • Johnson, Guy B. (1929) John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
  • Chappell, Louis W. (1933) John Henry; A Folk-Lore Study. Reprinted 1968. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press
  • Keats, Ezra Jack (1965) John Henry, An American Legend. New York: Pantheon Books.
  • Williams, Brett (1983) John Henry: A Bio-Bibliography by Brett Williams. Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press
  • Nelson, Scott. (Summer 2005) "Who Was John Henry? Railroad Construction, Southern Folklore, and the Birth of Rock and Roll." Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas Vol. 2. No. 2, pp. 53-79.
  • Nelson, Scott (2006) Steel Drivin' Man. Oxford University Press
  • Garst, John (November 27, 2006) "On the Trail of the Real John Henry". History News Network. (includes rebuttal by Scott Nelson)

[edit] External links

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