Scott Reynolds Nelson, a history professor at the College of William and Mary, used cultural clues and dogged research to track down this real-life John Henry, and tells the story in this fascinating new book. A well-balanced combination of scholarship and popular history, the first part of the book vividly, if swiftly, re-creates life in the Virginias during and immediately after Reconstruction.
Blacks, freed after the Civil War, remained subject to a separate justice system. When convicted of minor crimes they received disproportionate sentences. John William Henry, far from the mythological giant, was a short New Jersey teenager who became Prisoner 497 after he stole something from a grocery store outside Petersburg, Virginia in 1866. The prison needed to support itself. The railroads needed strong workers who couldn't strike for higher wages. Though seen by some reformers as a way to transfer prisoners out of terrible prison conditions and into healthy outdoor work, the resultant convict lease system turned out to be a death sentence for whole populations of inmates.
The invention of dynamite had made it feasible to tunnel through the hard, ancient rock of the Allegheny Mountains. But men still had to drill the holes for the explosives. In the early 1870s, railroad contractors were testing unreliable new steam drills alongside their teams of powerful, steel-driving men. Apparently, competition occurred. A legend was born.
Along with a concise history of Southern railroads and Reconstruction justice, Nelson traces the musical forms out of which different versions of the John Henry song evolved, explaining how songs and chants - often misinterpreted by whites as indicating high spirits - were really tools to prevent injury while working in teams. The new stream drills, for their part,
lacked the flexibility found in the skilled two-man hammer teams that had been tunneling through mountains for centuries. The hammer man swung a sledgehammer down onto the chisel. The shaker shifted the drill [the chisel] between blows to improve the drill's bite... Song coordinated the movements... humorous songs, sad songs, religious songs, all rhythm and meter and intonation but without an obvious melody - phrases, really... Theirs was a finely tuned instrument that a manufactured steam drill could not match. [C&O Railroad mogul Collis Porter] Huntington imagined that a steam drill could replace the skilled labor of miners, that he could work without their rock and roll. He was wrong.So, the next time Grandpa complains that "kids' music these days" is all beat and no tune, remind him that "rock and roll" got its backbeat, and its very name, from the motions and songs of black railroad diggers who toiled in the mountains long before he and Grandma were jitterbugging to the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
2 - John Garst
Good review of Nelson, "Steel Drivin' Man." You picked up a few flaws I hadn't noticed.
Overall, I like the book very much, but as Jon notes, there are some flaws in it. Some of its statements about early 20th century ballad and folksong scholarship are misleading if not simply incorrect.
Jon states that the evidence identifying John William Henry with the legendary steel driver is "inconclusive." I'd go further: it is nearly nonexistent.
I believe that the evidence for the historic John Henry at Dunnavant, Alabama, in 1887 is much stronger. It is not compelling, perhaps, but to me it is persuasive. See my article, "Chasing John Henry in Alabama and Mississippi," in Tributaries: Journal of the Alabama Folklife Association, Issue No. 5, 2002.
3 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Congratulations! This article has been selected as an Editors' Pick.