CHAPTER 14 | THE RISE OF URBAN FOLK MUSIC 351
In 1937 the Archive of American Folk
Song, supported since 1928 by donations
and outside monies, began receiving a
stipend from Congress. Alan Lomax was
hired as a staff member and remained
there until 1942. During his long career
Lomax worked indefatigably, making
thousands of fi eld recordings, compiling
oral histories, writing books and articles,
and producing radio programs and docu-
mentary fi lms about folk music both in the
United States and throughout the world.
Like his father before him, A lan Loma x
continued to make fi eld recordings of Afri-
can American music in southern penitentiaries. On one visit to a work camp in Mis-
sissippi in 1959 he recorded a prisoner, Ed Lewis, singing the traditional work song
“John Henry” (LG 14.4). Like much older ballads, “John Henry” exists in numerous
versions that confl ict in details but all tell the same basic story. John Henry is a pow-
erful man who drives spikes with a hammer in the building of a railroad. Matching
his strength with a steam-powered drill, he outperforms the machine but dies in
the contest. In some versions the infant John Henry foretells his death, and in some
versions his wife or girlfriend picks up his hammer and completes his job. In almost
all versions, John Henry tells his boss, or captain, that he will accept the steam drill’s
challenge even though “a man ain’t nothing but a man.”
Lewis’s version of “John Henry” situates the action on the Mobile and Ohio Rail-
road, but in most versions the action takes place on the Chesapeake and Ohio
(C&O), built in Virginia and West Virginia in the 1870s, and specifi cally in the Big
Bend tunnel, one of three long tunnels near the state line. Those tunnels were
constructed with the labor of prisoners from the Virginia Penitentiary, and the
historical John Henry, if such a person ever existed, would probably have been
one of those prisoners. W hen the old penitentiary buildings were torn down in
1992, workers discovered the shallow graves of some three hundred prisoners,
all buried in the 1870s, near a whitewashed building next to an old rail line, sug-
gesting one verse found in some versions of the song:
They took John Henry to the white house
And buried him in the sand
And every locomotive come roaring by
Says there lies that steel-driving man.
Whether or not one of those graves held an actual John Henry, the legendary
fi gure in the song became a powerful symbol of human strength and dignity in
the face of the crushing forces of industrialization.
Lewis accompanies his singing of the pentatonic melody with the rhythmic
swing of an ax. In stanzas 1–5, each ax stroke lands on the third beat of the bar.
A six-beat pause before stanza 6 (while Lewis recalls the words?) shifts the meter
of the sung melody so that the downbeat coincides with the ax strokes for a full
stanza. At the beginning of stanza 7 Lewis delays an ax stroke for two beats so
that it will once again fall on the third beat, which it does through the end of the
song. The implication is that the third beat is the correct place for the emphatic
stroke, not the downbeat, and that stanza 6 is a mistake in the performance.Alan Lomax on a Folklorist’s Duty
H
e goes where book-learning is not. He lives with the
underprivileged. He brings back the proof in their
songs and stories and dances that these folks are expressive
and concerned about the beautiful and the good. In doing
so, he continually denies the validity of caste lines and
caste barriers.... The folklorist has the duty to speak as the
advocate of the common man.In their own words
“John Henry”LG 14.4172028_14_332-360_r3_ko.indd 351 23/01/13 8:38 PM