The Steam Drill Only Made Nine (Lord, Lord)

When my siblings and I were kids, at some point Mom and Dad bought us a huge collection of LPs of music of all sorts — a passive music-appreciation course, of sorts, for kids in a small town. The entire set arrived in a cardboard box which none of us (but Dad) could lift. Each album was enclosed in its own slim box, with its own little brochure full of lyrics and other notes. (One album came with an additional surprise: the one about orchestral music included a small, slender conductor’s wand.)

I sometimes wonder whatever became of that set. Some of the albums got broken, for sure, but it’s hard to believe they all did. Maybe they ended up in the homes of my adult sisters and/or brother, or maybe — less likely, but you never know — maybe they’re taking up space down in Mom’s basement.

On the other hand, I don’t wonder what happened to the music itself. It — much of it — remains stuck in my head.

Among the hoariest of complaints by an older generation (any older generation) about the younger are those about “the music nowadays.” I try to keep an open mind, myself; I’ve heard too much wonderful music by people decades younger than I am to do otherwise. But I do worry from time to time about the looooong golden thread of folk music… and the prospect that it may be in jeopardy.

Well, no, that’s not quite right. Not the music per se. Let’s say I worry about the future of the stories which the music tells, and the language in which those stories are told.

Consider, for example, the song from which this post’s title comes. Show of hands: did you know immediately what song it comes from? sorta-kinda know? draw a complete blank?

The point isn’t that you should know the answer. (For one thing, I can easily believe the song never left North America, let alone got passed from one generation to another.) The point is that the story of railroad worker John Henry and his contest (both triumphant and tragic) against a new-fangled steam-powered drill doesn’t feel to me like one likely to endure.

And I don’t mean to single out this one song, either. Other songs from that old collection also feel, in retrospect, charming, quaint, and… pointless.

Drill ye tarriers, drill. I’ve got tuppence, jolly jolly tuppence. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care…

…all that. And it’s not just the stories and melodies, but the language: What the hell is a bluetail fly, anyway? Is Drury Lane even a real place, and who or what was the muffin man who lived there? Tarriers, for Pete’s sake? (Who was Pete, for that matter?) In twenty years, a decade, by 2012, will anybody know the answers to these questions without consulting Wikipedia or whatever its successor might be?

Now, the other side of the coin is that we’re also always inventing new folk tales — candidates, anyhow — and reinventing old ones. If there ever was a real John Henry (and apparently there was), he had to have lived sometime in the mid- to late 19th century: the song, therefore, can’t be even 200 years old. It’s not a legend handed down from medieval times, let alone Biblical or more ancient ones. The story’s young; it just feels old to someone who hasn’t also been around that long.

Its details are young, that is. The general themes — e.g., the tension between the human spirit (whatever that is) and progress, the “shock of the new” — are old. Less than a century before we had Ned Lud(d), for one. To this day, undoubtedly, many more people know what a Luddite is than remember John Henry. And I’d bet that that term, and the story behind it, will survive a lot longer than the John Henry tale.

(The creation of new legends and heroes isn’t limited to Western cultures, by the way. Froog reminded us a few months ago that it happens even in self-consciously “modern” China.)

The point is that the pace at which we’re destroying folklore and creating it anew seems to be accelerating, in the process shredding ties to the distant past, way too quickly to understand what (if any) the consequences might be.

But is any of this worth worrying about? Will it matter if no one remembers John Henry* in ten years, without looking it up? Or is the shape of the legend (man vs. machine, whatever), shorn of the details — is that all that really counts for a culture?

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* Or Paul Bunyan, Morgan le Fay, St. George, Coyote…

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Note: Just for the sake of completeness, here’s a portion of the lyrics to “John Henry.” These change from one performer to the next — from one performance to the next — so it’s a bit of a crapshoot; the ones below are attributed to Pete Seeger.

John Henry was about three days old,
Sittin’ on his papa’s knee.
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel;
Said, “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me, Lord, Lord.
Hammer’s gonna be the death of me.”

The captain said to John Henry
“Gonna bring that steam drill ’round.
Gonna bring that steam drill out on the job.
Gonna whop that steel on down, down, down.
Whop that steel on down.”

John Henry told his captain,
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a man,
But before I let your steam drill beat me down,
I’d die with a hammer in my hand, Lord, Lord.
I’d die with a hammer in my hand.”

John Henry said to his shaker,
“Shaker, why don’t you sing?
I’m throwin’ thirty pounds from my hips on down.
Just listen to that cold steel ring, Lord, Lord.
Listen to that cold steel ring.”

The man that invented the stream drill
Thought he was mighty fine.
But John Henry made fifteen feet —
The steam drill only made nine, Lord, Lord.
The steam drill only made nine.

John Henry hammered in the mountain
His hammer was striking fire.
But he worked so hard, he broke his poor heart.
He laid down his hammer and he died, Lord, Lord.
He laid down his hammer and he died.

…

Well, every Monday morning
When the bluebirds begin to sing.
You can hear John Henry a mile or more.
You can hear John Henry’s hammer ring. Lord, Lord.
You can hear John Henry’s hammer ring.

(The “shaker” referred to in this context was the other half of the hammer man’s team: the one who held the spike or drill in place, rotating it between blows. This was not, as seems to be commonly believed, to drive spikes to hold the rails themselves in place: it was to drill holes in rock, into which dynamite or other explosives could be placed, in order to — say — blast a tunnel through a mountain.)

Here’s an interpretation of “John Henry” by folk-blues-spiritual icon Odetta:

…and — why not? — here are the Smothers Brothers, doing a characteristic bit of legend-disassembly during a 1967 performance on The Ed Sullivan Show, taking on George Washington and Paul Bunyan too: