On the Trail of John Henry
A folklorist from the 1920s gathers evidence and stories of the legendary John Henry.
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
“On the Trail of John Henry,” from John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend by Guy Benton Johnson, 1929.
John Henry was a steel-drivin' man.
He hammered all over this lan'.
Thus begins one of the ballads about John Henry. And judging from the thousand and one different opinions as to where, when, and how John Henry came to his death, the ballad is about right. If John Henry did not hammer "all over this lan'," he must have hammered over a large portion of it, for his trail has many turnings and leads far and wide.
People have a way of speaking positively about this sort of thing. One man will assure you that he knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that John Henry worked and died in Alabama. Another will say, "Why, everybody knows that old John Henry beat the steam drill up at Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia." Still another will say, "No, John Henry never was in West Virginia." And so it goes. Nearly every southern state has its claim upon John Henry.
But the very inconsistency of some of these John Henry tales makes them alluring. They give us glimpses of the folk mind in the process of creating, enriching, and diffusing an actual legend. Whether John Henry was a flesh-and-blood man or not, there are thousands of Negroes who believe that he was, and many of them can give the intimate details of his career. By word of mouth, songs and stories about this great steel driver are passed on from old to young. Imagination and invention do their part, and the legend blossoms forth in new colors in each succeeding generation.
There are almost as many variations of the different aspects of the John Henry story as there are people who know anything about John Henry. To record them in detail would be an endless task. I shall point out some of the outstanding variations and leave the others to unfold as the account progresses.
Take, for example, the different ideas as to what sort of work John Henry did. Several Negroes have expressed a belief that John Henry was driving steel in a mine or in a quarry when he had his great battle with the steam drill. Still others think that John Henry was not the sort of steel driver who hammered a drill into rock or granite in order to prepare holes for explosives, but one who drove steel spikes into railroad crossties. One man, a student at the Virginia Normal and Industrial Institute, wrote me as follows:
...It happens that every summer I go away to work in order to return to school the next fall. Last summer I went to Brooklyn, N. Y., and obtained a job in the Arbuckle Sugar Co. It was there that I met a hard working fellow who sang this song every day, and as a boy I adopted it. The history is thus: John Henry, a spike driver, was working in the North at the time the steam driller was invented. It was taking work from all the drivers, and John Henry bet his boss he could drive the spike faster than the newly invented machine. The people heard about it and came from town to see it. He hummed a tune and drove the spike, he beat the machine but fell dead afterwards in his tracks. His pal continued to sing and ended the song.
Now I am not certain all of this is true but it is as I was told.
Riveting, another form of work which is sometimes classed as steel driving, is thought by some to have been John Henry's line.
Another idea which I have encountered is that John Henry was a pile driver, that is, one who drives piles or posts into the ground in some sort of construction work. My informant was not very clear on the matter, but he thought that the steam machine which was John Henry's undoing was an apparatus so arranged that a weight, lifted by steam power, was let fall upon the top of the pile.
Naturally the beliefs concerning the way John Henry came to his death vary with the type of work he was supposed to be doing. As a general rule, it is held that he competed with a mechanical drill, beat it, and dropped dead "with the hammer in his hand." Here, however, there is some difference of opinion. Some hold that John Henry died immediately after the contest; others think that he collapsed and was taken to his shanty, where he died that night.
An entirely different version has it that John Henry met his death from a blow of his partner's hammer. As one of the songs goes:
John Henry had a partner,
He loved to drive steel all the time.
The first thing he did he let his hammer slip,
And he killed John Henry dead,
And he killed John Henry dead.
Some say that his partner held a grudge against him, and so "busted his brains out" to get even with him. Others think that the fatal blow was entirely accidental: John Henry and another man were driving at "doubles," and John Henry somehow got his head in the way of his partner's hammer. Thus the lines of the work song,
This old hammer
Killed John Henry,
Can't kill me, Lord,
Can't kill me,
may mean one thing to one man and something entirely different to another.
There is another version of John Henry's death: he was killed by a railroad train. Many Negroes think of him as a railroad man; so it is only natural that they believe he died this way. One of the ballads has this stanza:
They found him early one morning
A mile and a half from town,
His head cut off in the driving wheel,
And his body ain't never been found.
Finally, one occasionally finds the notion that John Henry was a "bad man." The following account came from a young woman of Summerville, Georgia. It traces John Henry from the cradle to the grave, and for once John Henry is pictured dying an ordinary death
....This John Henry song and story has been in our family for twelve years. An old Bachelor came through from Arkansas an spent the night with us he gave us a Ballad of John Henry and a sketch story of his life I remember a little of the story. John Henry was a bright child he had a famous father whom he was named after and when he was a lad nine years old his father was a steel driver. When he died he told his son he wanted him to be a man after him self. John tried to carry out his father's plan the Boss man he worked under Bought him a ten pound hammer to steel drive with before that he would drive nails in the wall for hours at a time, after that he married he had a loving little wife and she was true to him. he taken sick, he had worked his self down, his boss wanted him to work while he was sick, his boss was mean to him when he got able to walk around he went to his Boss man's house he throw his gun on him and told him how cruel he had treated him. his bos Begged for mercy But it was to late. John Henry shot him in the side. This mans people had him J. H. put in penitentary for life. An then he was under another Cruel Boss man this time he taken sick and had to go home his wife taken his place untill he got so low she had to be at his bed side. When he was yet on his death bed the people that stood by him he told them to take care of his wife and child, he had a little boy he named him after him self John Henry, he died soon after that, people came from all parts of the world to see this Famous man John Henry.
Next take the question of John Henry's surname. Of course his full name might have been just John Henry. That is quite possible in view of the fact that John Henry has for more than a hundred years served as full name for any number of Negroes. In Carter Woodson's compilation, Free Negro Heads of Families in the United States in 1830, I find eleven men named John Henry. The number, both slave and free, who bore the name must have been many times that large. However, I often ask Negroes what John Henry's surname was. Most of them do not pretend to know, but a few claim to know beyond any doubt. From Utah I learned that John Henry's surname was Dabney. From North Carolina I got his name as John Henry Dula; from West Virginia, John Henry Martin; from Ohio, John Henry Jones; from Virginia, John Henry Brown; from New York, John Henry Whitsett.
What was John Henry's native state? Some say that he was a North Carolinian. Others say he was from South Carolina or Tennessee or Alabama or some other state. I am sure that nearly every southern state has claimed him at one time or another, and there are even those who say that John Henry was from "up north." Some Negroes feel very strongly on this matter of the native state. Mr. Walter Jordan, of New York City, says, "I heard an old-timer say that he once saw a big fight because one man sang that John Henry came from some other place than East Virginia in the stanza:
Some say he came from England,
Some say he came from Spain,
But it's no such thing, he was an East Virginia man,
And he died with the hammer in his hand,
He died with the hammer in his hand."
Thus it goes. Of the making of John Henry stories there is no end. These are only a few examples of the current ideas about John Henry. The interminable variety of other aspects of the John Henry tradition will make themselves apparent later.
And now, in spite of the thousand and one varieties of John Henryism, I must hasten to say again that on the whole the opinion of the Negro folk clusters pretty regularly around the belief that John Henry was the sort of steel driver who "hit the drill on the head," and that he met his death in a railroad tunnel after beating a steam drill.
There are still many men living who claim to have seen John Henry in the flesh. Then there are the sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, nieces, nephews, and what-not of men who knew John Henry. Fortunately for the student of this tradition, John Henry's origin is not so far in the past but that there are persons yet living who might have known him.
Johnson, Guy Benton. John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend. The University of North Carolina Press, 1929.
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