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John Henry is an American folk hero. An African American freedman, he is said to have worked as a "steel-driving man"—a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into a rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel.
May 13, 2024 · John Henry, hero of a widely sung African American folk ballad. It describes his contest with a steam drill, in which John Henry crushed more rock than did the machine but died “with his hammer in his hand.”
Folklorists have long thought John Henry to be mythical, but historian Scott Nelson has discovered that he was a real person—a nineteen-year-old from New Jersey who was convicted of theft in a Virginia court in 1866, sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary, and put to work building the C&O Railroad.
John Henryism (or simply JH) is the act of responding to prolonged stresses’ at work, in daily life, or from social discrimination’ by expending higher and higher levels of effort to resolve an issue or improve one’s lot, until the stresses result in physical or psychological illness.
Dec 9, 2020 · As a Black American folk hero, John Henry became an icon of the Civil Rights Movement, and even today his story's universal themes resonate, as the automation of work and the ubiquity of technology raise questions about the value of human labor and what is inevitably lost with the march of technological progress.
The origin of the John Henry legend can be traced back to the late 19th century, during the height of railroad construction in the United States. According to folklore, John Henry was a steel driver—a manual laborer tasked with hammering steel drills into rock to create holes for explosives.
Hundreds of men would lose their lives to Big Bend before it was over, their bodies piled into makeshift, sandy graves just steps outside the mountain. John Henry was one of them. As the story goes, John Henry was the strongest, fastest, most powerful man working on the rails.
