John Henry (folklore)

John Henry is an American folk hero. A Black American freedman, he is said to have worked as a "steel-driving man"—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill (such as a star drill or similar) into a rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel.

The story of John Henry is told in a classic blues folk song about his duel against a drilling machine, which exists in many versions, and has been the subject of numerous stories, plays, books, and novels. Lewis Tunnel in Virginia, and Coosa Mountain Tunnel in Alabama, have been suggested as the site of the contest.

A real hammerman would have needed to work in tandem with a shaker, who would hold a chisel-like drill against mountain rock, wiggling and rotating the drill to optimize its bite. However, John Henry's shaker is seldom if ever mentioned in the tale. As a result, some retellings recast John Henry as a railroad worker driving spikes into railway tracks, and his mechanical opponent as a primitive rail fastening system.

History

The historical accuracy of many of the aspects of the John Henry legend are subject to debate.

Several locations have been put forth for the tunnel on which John Henry died.

Big Bend Tunnel

alt=White plaque with the following text: BIG BEND TUNNEL. The great tunnel of the C & O Railroad was started at Big Bend in 1870 and completed three years later. It is more than a mile long, and now has a twin tunnel. Tradition makes this the scene of the steel drivers' ballad, "John Henry."|thumb|Sign outside of the Big Bend Tunnel noting its connection to the legend of John Henry

Sociologist Guy Benton Johnson investigated the legend of John Henry in the late 1920s. He concluded that John Henry might have worked on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway's (C&O Railway) Big Bend Tunnel but that "one can make out a case either for or against" it.

When Johnson contacted Chief Engineer C. W. Johns of the C&O Railroad regarding Big Bend Tunnel, Johns replied that "no steam drills were ever used in this tunnel." When asked about documentation from the period, Johns replied that "all such papers have been destroyed by fire."

Lewis Tunnel

thumb|John Henry statue in Summers County, West Virginia

In the 2006 book Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend, historian Scott Reynolds Nelson detailed his discovering documentation of a 19-year-old African-American man alternately referred to as John Henry, John W. Henry, or John William Henry in previously unexplored prison records of the Virginia Penitentiary. At the time, penitentiary inmates were hired out as laborers to various contractors, and this John Henry was noted as having headed the first group of prisoners to be assigned tunnel work. Nelson also discovered the C&O's tunneling records, which the company believed had been destroyed by fire. Henry, like many African Americans, might have come to Virginia to work on the clean-up of the battlefields after the American Civil War. Arrested and tried for burglary, John Henry was in the first group of convicts released by the warden to work as leased labor on the C&O Railway.

According to Nelson, objectionable conditions at the Virginia prison led the warden to believe that the prisoners, many of whom had been arrested on trivial charges, would be better clothed and fed if they were released as laborers to private contractors (he subsequently changed his mind about this and became an opponent of the convict labor system). In the C&O's tunneling records, Nelson found no evidence of a steam drill used in Big Bend Tunnel. Nelson also argues that the verses of the ballad about John Henry being buried near "the white house," "in the sand," somewhere that locomotives roar, mean that Henry's body was buried in a ditch behind the so-called white house of the Virginia State Penitentiary, which photos from that time indicate was painted white, and where numerous unmarked graves have been found.

Prison records for John William Henry stopped in 1873, suggesting that he was kept on the record books until it was clear that he was not coming back and had died. Nelson stresses that John Henry would have been representative of the many hundreds of convict laborers who were killed in unknown circumstances tunneling through the mountains or who died shortly afterwards of silicosis from dust created by the drills and blasting.

In popular culture

The tale of John Henry has been used as a symbol in many cultural movements, including labor movements and the Civil Rights Movement.

Animation

In 1946, animator George Pal adapted the tale of John Henry into a short film titled John Henry and the Inky-Poo as part of his theatrical stop-motion Puppetoons series. The short is considered a milestone in American cinema as one of the first films to have a positive view of African-American folklore.
In 1974, Nick Bosustow and David Adams co-produced an 11-minute animated short, The Legend of John Henry, for Paramount Pictures.
The character appears in a Walt Disney Feature Animation short film, John Henry (2000). Directed by Mark Henn, plans for theatrical releases in 2000 and 2001 fell through after the short had a limited Academy Award qualifying run in Los Angeles; a shorter version was released as the only new entry in the direct-to-video release Disney's American Legends (2002). It was eventually released in its original format as an interstitial on the Disney Channel, and later as part of the home video compilation Walt Disney Animation Studios Short Films Collection in 2015.
In 2001, Russian animator Andrey Zolotukhin directed a 13-minute animated short, John Henry, Steel Driving Man, for HBO. The short became a part of animated series Animated Tales of the World, which received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Animation.

Television

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy Season 6 episode "Short Tall Tales" shows a parody of John Henry's tale with Irwin in the role. Grim decides to sabotage the story by powering up the drilling machine to go faster, and Irwin forces himself to hammer through the mountain faster to surpass it, but by doing so he ends up breaking into the 8th dimension, where aliens feed him to one of their giant monstrous females.
A plot similar to the story of John Henry is featured in season 5 episode 88b of SpongeBob SquarePants, in which Squidward debuts a "patty gadget" in the hopes of replacing SpongeBob's role in the restaurant, leading to a duel of skill between the two. Like many traditional tellings of the story, the episode is presented as a narrated, rhyming ballad.
John Henry is featured in the 22nd episode of Season 5 of Teen Titans Go!, "Tall Titan Tales".
John Henry appears in the Pinky and the Brain episode "A Legendary Tail".
Henry was the center of an episode of the Nickelodeon game show Legends of the Hidden Temple. The objective on the show saw contestants learn of the legend of John Henry, compete in challenges based on his story, and the winning team attempt to retrieve his hammer from the show's Temple.
The AI character of John Henry (Garret Dillahunt), from season 2 of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, is named after the folk hero for managing to beat a machine that replaces the work of man - paralleling the central conflict of the show and the franchise of fighting against an artificial superintelligence that nearly causes the extinction of the human race in the future through nuclear attacks and Terminators.
John Henry appears in a segment of the short-lived Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures TV series. In an episode titled "Pocket Watch Full of Miracles", which aired in November 1990, John Henry is portrayed as having the mannerisms of Muhammad Ali. He challenges and beats a steam-powered hammer driven by his boss. His prize is an antique pocket watch owned by Queen Victoria. The watch is given to the titular Bill and Ted, only to be immediately destroyed by a runaway train.
Danny Glover played the character in the series, Shelley Duvall's Tall Tales & Legends from 1985 to 1987. Shelley Duvall served as the series' creator, presenter, narrator, and executive producer.
On the Adult Swim series, Saul of the Mole Men, John Henry (voiced by Tommy "Tiny" Lister) has been living at the centre of the Earth since his victory over the steam drill, having become a cyborg at sometime in the intervening centuries. He befriends and later sacrifices himself to save protagonist Saul Malone.

Radio

Destination Freedom, a 1950s American old time radio series written by Richard Durham, featured John Henry in a July 1949 episode.

Music

thumb|Eben Given illustration of "John Henry—Steel Driving Man" from Here's audacity: American legendary heroes (1930)

The story of John Henry is traditionally told through two types of songs: ballads, commonly called "The Ballad of John Henry", and "hammer songs" (a type of work song), each with wide-ranging and varying lyrics.

Henry Thomas
Charley Crockett
Mississippi Fred McDowell (on Ann Arbor Blues Festival 1969: Vols 1&2)
Doc Watson
Burl Ives
John Hartford (on Goin' Back to Dixie)
Jesse Fuller
Cannonball Adderley – Big Man: The Legend of John Henry
Bill Monroe
The New Christy Minstrels

:"John Henry and the Steam Drill" and "Natural Man", both on Land of Giants (1964)

Dave Van Ronk Dave Van Ronk Sings Ballads, Blues, and a Spiritual
Kabir Suman
Hemanga Biswas
Johnny Cash
Drive-By Truckers (on their The Dirty South album)
Joe Bonamassa
Fiddlin' John Carson
Pete Seeger
Harry Belafonte
Mississippi John Hurt (as "Spike Driver Blues")
Lonnie Donegan
Jack Warshaw
John Fahey
Steve Earle
Justin Townes Earle
The Limeliters
Emily Saliers
Willie Watson
Bill Wood
Smothers Brothers on their 1963 album Think Ethnic
Songs: Ohia
Charlie Parr
Those Poor Bastards

The story also inspired the Aaron Copland's orchestral composition "John Henry" (1940, revised 1952), the 1994 chamber music piece Come Down Heavy by Evan Chambers and the 2009 chamber music piece Steel Hammer by the composer Julia Wolfe.

They Might Be Giants named their fifth studio album after John Henry as an allusion to their usage of a full band on this album rather than the drum machine that they had employed previously.

The American cowpunk band Nine Pound Hammer is named after the traditional description of the hammer John Henry wielded.

Bengali musician Hemanga Biswas translated the song in Bengali. Bangladeshi mass singer Fakir Alamgir later covered this version of the song.

Literature

Henry is the subject of the 1931 Roark Bradford novel John Henry, illustrated by noted woodcut artist J. J. Lankes. The novel was adapted into a stage musical in 1940, starring Paul Robeson in the title role. According to Steven Carl Tracy, Bradford's works were influential in broadly popularizing the John Henry legend beyond railroad and mining communities and outside of African American oral histories.
In a 1933 article published in The Journal of Negro Education, Bradford's John Henry was criticized for "making over a folk-hero into a clown." A 1948 obituary for Bradford described John Henry as "a better piece of native folklore than Paul Bunyan."
Ezra Jack Keats's John Henry: An American Legend, published in 1965, is a notable picture book chronicling the history of John Henry and portraying him as the "personification of the medieval Everyman who struggles against insurmountable odds and wins."
Colson Whitehead's 2001 novel John Henry Days uses the John Henry myth as story background. Whitehead fictionalized the John Henry Days festival in Talcott, West Virginia and the release of the John Henry postage stamp in 1996.
In his nonfiction account Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press 2008), historian Scott Reynolds Nelson attempts to find the real man behind the legend, with a particular focus on Reconstruction-era Virginia and the use of prison labor for building railroads.
Elements of John Henry's legend were featured in DC Comics.
In the comic series DC: The New Frontier, an African-American man named John Wilson becomes a vigilante named John Henry in order to battle the Ku Klux Klan after his family is lynched.
The superhero Steel's civilian name "John Henry Irons" is inspired by John Henry. The story of John Henry further inspired Steel's weapon of choice, a sledgehammer.
In DC's Super Friends #21 (January 2010), Superman encountered the actual John Henry after being placed in the folk tale by the Queen of Fables.
Issue #6 of "Flashpoint Beyond" and issue #1 of The New Golden Age revealed that there was a Golden Age superhero named John Henry Jr.
John Henry the Revelator by Constantine von Hoffman is a magical realist novel, in which a teenage boy in 1930s Alabama, Moses Crawford, acquires superpowers and helps challenge the nation's white power structure. The black community calls Crawford John Henry, after the folk hero, because no one is aware of his true identity.
He makes an appearance in the IDW Publishing miniseries The Transformers: Hearts of Steel, with the steel-driving machine being the alternate mode of the Autobot Bumblebee, who ends up befriending Henry.

United States postage stamp

In 1996, the US Postal Service issued a John Henry postage stamp. It was part of a set honoring American folk heroes that included Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill and Casey at the Bat.

Video games

John Henry was featured as a fictional character in the 2014 video game Wasteland 2. The story is referenced by various NPCs throughout the game and is also available in full as a series of in game books which tell the story of the competition between John Henry and a contingent of robotic workers.
Big Bend Tunnel, is a location in Fallout 76
He also appeared as a playable character in the Nintendo 3DS game Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. voiced by Michael Dorn.
John Henry was a member of the original BLU team in Team Fortress 2.

References

Notes

External links

Lyrics to various versions of "John Henry"
Survey of books about the legend of John Henry
Website on racial protest and resistance in the John henry ballad.
John Henry bibliography compiled by the Archive of Folk Culture staff at the Library of Congress