HUM 223: Springsteen's 'John Henry'

On Friday (or sometime soon) we'll be listening to "John Henry" as performed by Bruce Springsteen and the eclectic group of musicians he brought together to cut his Seeger Sessions CD. We'll probably hear "John Henry" again - it's one of the most important single songs in American music history. For now, I want to concentrate on how a guy named Ed Ward writes about it.

Ward is a rock critic. He coauthored the Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, and he's written for Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy and Creem magazines. He wrote an essay on the Seeger Sessions for WNET-TV, the Public Broadcasting System's flagship station in New York City. Notice how fluently he writes:

How is it that the songs Bruce Springsteen taps into for his latest project are so familiar? From "We Shall Overcome," of the CD's title, to "John Henry," these are from a body of songs that "everybody" of a certain age knew. You might have learned them at school, at camp, in church, or from television. You felt you'd just always known them, even though you had no idea where they came from or who wrote them.

Only much, much later might you have begun analyzing the songs. "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain ..." What is that, anyway? Who is "she"? Why is her arrival so important? Or, speaking of mountains, how about "Big Rock Candy Mountain"? Never mind the fact that rock candy isn't around much these days; all of a sudden it dawns on you that this is a song about hunger, hunger as experienced by people without a home, but yearning for one where there's no effort in obtaining life's basic needs, at last. You've stumbled upon an artifact of America's hobo class, as chronicled by singer Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock -- something that both does and doesn't exist today, a social problem going back to, among other things, the federal government's treatment of Civil War veterans.

Which is just another way of saying that folk music is complicated but easy. Easy to learn, easy to play and sing, but complex in its content when looked at closely.

And notice what he says about "John Henry." It's incisive. It suggests why the song matters, and it gives us something to think about:

And how about "John Henry"? A tune about an African-American martyr to the industrial system -- the giant who beat a steam drill and died from his mighty exertions -- has been sung for years and now will be introduced to a new generation, thanks to Springsteen's decision to include it in his SEEGER SESSIONS CD. Did John Henry exist? Who are the others in the story? And, come to think of it, why is it so much fun to hear about a guy killing himself with overwork?

His legacy doesn't stop there. Examine this song long enough and you realize that John Henry is black and the boss, the guy running the steam drill, is white. Is this one of the reasons that beating the drill is so important -- not just to John Henry but to the song's survival? Obviously, there's something affirming in knowing that the human body, the human spirit, can outdo the machine, but there's something more: behind the jolly tune and its story, this, like many folk songs, is a protest song.

Well, I think "John Henry" is more than just a protest song. I heard a lot of them in the 1960s, and most of them are just as well forgotten. But "John Henry" has been around since the 1800s, and I still admire what it says about the human spirit. The points Ward raises here are worth thinking about. And his writing is certainly worth using as a model for my own. At least trying to.