Prompt 5. Nelson argues that different groups of people–miners, prison convicts, railroad workers, twentieth-century “folk” musicians, and white Southern mill workers–all developed their own distinctive versions of the John Henry story and song. What were the key differences between the versions of these different groups? Can their versions of the song shed light on the way these various groups viewed the world?
Not long after his death, railroad workers took songs about John Henry, and they used them for working, but they also used them as a warning. The rhythm not only slowed down the working pace of the men, it warned them to slow their whole pace down, for their own sakes. Especially when they were working with sandstone and silica, this warning extended the men’s lives, and in the case of the Big Bend Tunnel, allowed them to stop in time to strike and avoid a death from the silica in the air. And especially when the black men were predisposed to have heart problems that might end their life, the warnings of John Henry’s story to slow down were especially pertinent to the African American convicts working on the railroad. This version of the song as compared to the others shows how rough the men on the railroad had it. The song was not a joyous thing. It was a slow dirge, a warning, a sad ballad. Not anything like what it eventually became.
Miners treated the song in much the same way. John Henry fit really well into the mining ballads of the time, and so miners used it to keep time between hammer beats, and to keep themselves from staying in the mine too long.
Prisoners “kept the song alive and spread it far beyond the world of tunnels and mines” by picking it up and then using it as their own personal reminder of the shortness of life, as well as “the danger of dying unremembered”. So Henry’s story became a warning, and then once they passed, an “emblem” of their unmourned death.
The “folk” musicians of the twentieth century took on these songs and instead used them as a symbolic descriptor of the common laboring man, one they might not have known anything about. Carl Sandburg, at least, knew what he was talking about when he pulled out his guitar that first day.
White Southern mill workers used John Henry songs to mirror their own struggles against the machines of the developing cities of America. “John Henry’s fateful battle with a steam-powered machine would seem quaint, but hauntingly familiar” to these people, as well as the soldiers Nelson originally uses this sentence to describe. As machines became more and more prominent in the mills, the workers had to race to keep up with them, working faster and faster in their attempts. And, much like silica to John Henry, microscopic cotton fibers were breathed in and eventually “gummed up” the lungs. So, once it became a country song, John Henry’s tale became a hit amongst them.
The different groups of people that created song from John Henry’s tale had differing musics and motives behind their usages, but they all somehow saw John Henry in themselves.