The Legend of John Henry, Steel Driver, Symbol, Song

Somewhere in the hills of Summers County, in the early eighteen seventies, a man named John Henry swung a steel drill against the face of a mountain and drove it deeper than a steam-powered machine could. Then he sat down and died. That, at least, is what the song says.

The song is one of the oldest and most recorded folk ballads in American history, and it attaches John Henry specifically to the Big Bend Tunnel on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in what is now southern West Virginia. The tunnel was blasted through more than a mile of red shale in the early eighteen seventies, and the work was done largely by Black men, many of them formerly enslaved, working in conditions that were close to those of the convict leasing system. The death toll during construction was significant, though the records are incomplete and historians have noted the difficulty of pinning down precise numbers.

Whether John Henry was a specific man who lived and died at Big Bend, or a composite figure who gathered up the grief and pride of every man who ever drove steel, has been debated by folklorists for more than a century. The scholar Scott Reynolds Nelson spent years making the case for a real John Henry, a convict leased from the Virginia Penitentiary, whose story migrated into song. Nelson places that man at the Lewis Tunnel in Virginia rather than at Big Bend. Other scholars are less certain.

What is not debated is what the legend means. A Black man, matched against a machine, outperforming it on behalf of human dignity, and dying from the effort. In the early eighteen seventies, in the mountains of West Virginia, that story had a weight that went far beyond any one tunnel.