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  • Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend
  • Linda Grant Niemann (bio)
Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend. By Scott Reynolds Nelson . New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. 214. $25.

This is a remarkable book. The quality of the research, the literary style, and the depth of its conclusions are all first-rate. The author, Scott Nelson, is a historian who became interested in tracking down the real John Henry of railroad song and legend. What is remarkable is that, having found him, he [End Page 656] was able to transmit the excitement of his research to the reader, so that the book reads like the detective story that it is. Who would have thought that "the real John Henry was short and born in New Jersey!" (p. 39).

Nelson's path to his discovery involves using the John Henry songs as a treasure map. He first visits the spot where John Henry was said to have died outracing a steam drill during construction of the Big Bend railroad tunnel in West Virginia. His research into steam drivers and convict labor in the Reconstruction South led Nelson to another tunnel at a nearby location where he was able to place the convict John Henry at the time of the story. Other clues in the songs uncovered the place of his burial. Convict records revealed the actual man and his true history. Nelson paints a picture of a man swept along by the "Black Laws" into what amounted to a death sentence for a minor crime, made so by the hazards of working alongside steam drills in the slate-rock formations of the Appalachians.

Nelson's discovery of the true circumstances of John Henry's death led him to a reinterpretation of the meaning of the song. The song had many interpretative transformations, the most common being the iconic image of John Henry as a giant and a hero, whose song is about triumph over the machine and triumph over oppression. Nelson emphasizes that as a "hammer song" used to create a work rhythm, the song was more of a warning to "slow down." John Henry's death was the result of not heeding the warning about overwork. For me, as a reader, this discovery of Nelson's was even more significant than his tracking down of the historical facts. As a railroad worker myself, I felt the truth of this statement in my bones and I also recognize that this truth is not allowed to surface in our national consciousness. We don't want to recognize the human toll that labor exploitation creates. Labor is a word that we would prefer to remain faceless, or, if is to be represented by the image of John Henry, we would prefer an image of a muscled giant who can easily stand up to the challenge of work. But a five-foot, one-inch undernourished convict who died on the job as a result of being matched against steam power? Not a truth we want to recognize. And so the hammer song truth, warning about overwork, became subsumed in consequent versions of the John Henry legend. To me this was the prime discovery of this book. As Nelson says, "understanding the complicated context allows us to hear 'John Henry' as a terrible and beautiful song both" (p. 36).

Once he has established the history behind the legendary event, Nelson goes on to trace the genealogies of the song itself. He covers three major tracks: coal miners' variations, convict work-song variations, and trackliners' (railroad workers) variations. He then looks at the appropriation of the song by certain performers and by the American Communist Party, which saw in the song an idealized image of labor. These tracings are interesting and informative, but can hardly match the revelations of the earlier chapters. If I have any criticism of the book, it would be that the last section [End Page 657] seems anticlimactic. But then, Nelson has so much interesting research to share that following the John Henry story into its song history is also a rewarding, though less intense, reading experience. Five...

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