This great ballad of the working man dates from early last century and appears to relate to events in Victorian times. Whether or not there ever was a John Henry, and whether or not anything like the events in the ballad actually happened, there is no doubt that John Henry stands as a powerful symbol of the worker throughout the ages, taking what positives he can from a hardscrabble existence by maintaining a desperate pride in his own competence, even while knowing that he is likely to be ruthlessly cast aside as soon as that competence wanes, or better comes along to replace him.

Poor John, though – he never really had a chance against the inexorable rise of the machine. And of course, in one form or another it still goes on. Back in the nineteen eighties when my day job was computer programmer (it paid better than being a poet by a ratio of approximately 300 to 1) I was involved in coding a software package to perform a ‘cost rollup’, that is, to calculate the total cost of a final assembly by adding up the cost of all its individual components, and also to allow the user to see what would be the effect of changing the cost of any particular widget in the hierarchy. It is the sort of thing that computers can do very well but which is laborious for humans. I remember at one firm a worker whose job had been to make this kind of calculation by hand shaking his head in sad disbelief as the computer carried out in a couple of minutes work that he was used to spending many hours on. I felt obscurely guilty.

The text of the ballad exists in various versions, and it has been covered by numerous folksingers: I use the version I happen to know best, and which I think is punchier than some.

John Henry

John Henry was a little baby,
Sitting on his mammy’s knee.
He gave one long and a lonesome cry,
Said ‘That hammer’ll be the death of me’.

John Henry he had a woman,
Name was Mary Magdalen.
She would go to the tunnel an’ sing for John,
Jes’ to hear John Henry’s hammer ring.

Captain said to John Henry
‘Gonna bring me a steamdrill round,
Gonna take that steamdrill out on the job,
Gonna whop that steel on down.’

John Henry told his captain,
Lightnin’ was in his eye:
‘I’ll never be conquered by your old steam drill,
I’ll beat it to the bottom or I’ll die.’

John Henry walked in the tunnel,
Had his captain by his side,
But the rock so tall, John Henry so small,
Lord, he laid down his hammer an’ he cried.

Now John Henry start on the right hand,
The steam drill start on the left.
‘Before I let this steam drill beat me down,
I’d hammer myself to death.’

Well, John Henry kissed his hammer,
The white man turned on the steam;
Little Bill held John Henry’s trusty steel,
Was the biggest race the world ever seen.

Now John Henry swung his hammer
An’ he brought it down on the ground,
An’ a man in Chatanooga two hundred mile away
Thought he heard a sobbing sound.

Oh the captain said to John Henry
‘I believe this mountain’s fallin’ in.’
John Henry said to his captain
‘Taint nothin’ but my hammer sucking wind.’

John Henry said as he took his stand
‘This’ll be the end of me.’
But every foot that steam drill drove
John Henry’s hammer drove three.

Now the hammer that John Henry swung
It weighed over nine pound.
He broke a rib in his left hand side
And his entrails fell on the ground.

John Henry was hammerin’ on the mountain
An’ his hammer was strikin’ fire.
He drove so hard till he broke his heart
An’ he lay down his hammer an’ he died.

Now all the women out in Kansas
When they heard of John Henry’s death,
They stood in the rain, flagged the eastbound train,
Goin’ where John drew his last breath.

When John Henry died there wasn’t no box
Was big enough to hold his bones
So they buried him in a boxcar deep in the ground,
Let two mountains be his gravestones.

An’ they took John Henry from the graveyard
An’ buried him away in the sand,
An’ every locomotive comin’ roarin’ by
Whistles ‘There lies a steel drivin’ man.’

Anon