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Southern Cultures 10.2 (2004) 77


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John Hardy:

A desperate little man

It's hard to believe, but one of the puzzles that early-twentieth-century folklorists spent time sorting out was whether John Henry and John Hardy were the same man. John Hardy was the villain of a murder ballad that also originated in southern West Virginia. Though "John Hardy" isn't quite as well-known as "John Henry," the song is also part of both black and white musical traditions. Lead Belly often performed it in the 1940s. Odds are, he learned it from the Carter Family's 1928 record.

The confusion between John Henry and John Hardy was deeper than the similarity of names. Even W. A. McCorkle, the former governor of West Virginia, mixed up the two. In a 1916 letter, McCorkle wrote that John Henry, the famous steel driver of the 1870s, had gone bad and killed a man in the 1890s.

The facts established by Louis Chappell in the 1920s proved something else altogether. John Hardy, "a desperate little man," was hanged at Welch, West Virginia, on January 19, 1894, after killing a man in a gambling dispute in the Shawnee coal camp. He was described by those who saw him as a small, tough man still in his twenties at the time of the crime, making it impossible that twenty-two years earlier he had been the hero of Big Bend Tunnel.



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