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John Henry

from Mentor by William Ritter

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about

I learned this version of "John Henry" from Wayne Ledford of Glenn Ayre, NC. His brother Steve was a well known fiddler in the 30's. Ray Dellinger sang essentially the same version. Even in his nineties, Wayne was still a great old-time guitarist. I'll never forget him saying, "Judge Judy, she's sharp enough to stick in the ground, and green enough to root!" Wayne was very careful to show me John Henry on the guitar, with an ambiguous sounding one-finger minor chord. I was amused that he called this the Old Way of playing John Henry, and that the Carter Family played it the new way. The real-life story of John Henry is tragic and complex--a tale of Jim Crow laws, forced convict-lease labor, silicosis: It deserves a liner-book, not a liner-note. The line about carrying John Henry to the White House I actually learned from Peter Rowan one night at the old Cataloochee Ranch when we were sitting around swapping old songs. He explained that the "White House" line actually referred to a tuberculosis hospital. It's hard to know how many people diagnosed with "consumption" were actually showing symptoms of silicosis--from breathing in rock dust in mining, road-building, industry and other tasks that kicked up clouds of particulate matter. Notably, all of the singers I heard in Mitchell County did not sing lines about "beating a steam drill," so I never learned them. Later I did a fairly exhaustive search of versions of John Henry by black performers, and found that none of them mentioned beating the steam drill. I suspect that white southern singers in the post civil war era latched onto the metaphor of the old ways fighting a valiant so-called "lost cause" fight against the might of industrial progress--whereas black performers, aware of the reality of being unjustly incarcerated and placed on deadly chain gangs for trumped up petty crimes, would have found little to celebrate in being worked to death building a road. Many convict lease laborers did die building the Swannanoa and Cowee Tunnels, or at Hawks Nest in West Virginia. We are dimly aware of those stories because of the large numbers of people that died, but railroad lines across the south are lined with the graves of the laborers that built them. The last line of the lyric Peter sang really says it all: "and every time a freight train passed by, it's yonder lies a steel-driving man."

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from Mentor, released September 23, 2022

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William Ritter Bakersville, North Carolina

William Ritter is a native of Bakersville, NC William plays banjo, fiddle, guitar, and other "string-ed things." He is particularly interested in old apple trees, family heirloom seeds, and mountain humor. In 2019, he received the *In These Mountains* Folklife Apprenticeship Grant from the NC Arts Council to study with ballad singer extraordinaire, Bobby McMillon. ... more

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