Busted is an autobiographical song about a cotton farmer facing depressed prices, sick children, and too many bills to pay who has to swallow his pride and ask for financial help. Cash sings about train conductors ( Casey Jones), coal miners ( Nine Pound Hammer), convict laborers ( Chain Gang), and oil field workers ( Roughnecks). The album is a collection of songs about the inherent (but often ignored) dignity of and the suffering of hard-working men who can never get ahead. “The Legend of Johnny Henry’s Hammer” is one of the songs on Johnny Cash’s 1963 album, Blood, Sweat, and Tears. His family worked hard, but never escaped their poverty. BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARSĪs we looked at in the Introduction, Cash grew up on a family cotton farm in eastern Arkansas. He dies because he simply worked too hard. He worked hard from sun-up to sundown all of his life, but he always lived on the edge of extreme poverty and financial ruin. However, the morning after he remarks that “this is the first time I ever watched the sun come up that I couldn’t come up with it.” Johny Henry never made it out of bed. He takes up the challenge against the steam and prevails. He simply cannot give in to a machine taking his job. John Henry has to work because he has “four little brothers and a baby sister” to support. For the foreman, the man John Henry is simply a means of production like the steam drill. The foreman is pleased when the steam drill comes online so that he can discard John Henry. John Henry works for a foreman that only calls him “boy” and sees him not as a person but simply as a ball of muscles that work a drill. In doing his duty towards his family he will never escape his impoverished condition. John Henry cannot work and save because he is always paying off a debt owed by his family. He gets paid $0.35 per day of which $0.25 goes towards the unpaid medical bills. When the children get sick and the doctor needs to be paid, John Henry goes to work. With their dad incarcerated, John Henry has to support his mom and siblings. The father tells him “to learn to ball a jack, learn to lay a track, learn to pick and shovel too” and he will always have a job. The song begins with John Henry’s father’s parting words to his son before the father goes to jail abandoning the young man and his family. The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer is a song about an incarcerated father, unpaid medical bills, generational poverty, racism, and, of course, machines replacing working men. Johnny Cash uses the Legend of John Henry to tell us the story of the pitfalls facing most hard-working but financially insecure American families. He becomes a testament to the idea that hard-working men were being replaced by technology. On that day, John Henry drills faster and deeper than the machine, but that night he dies of exhaustion. John Henry takes up the challenge of man versus machine. But the railroad company brings in a steam drill to speed up the work and to replace men like him. In the legend, John Henry is a black man who works the hammer and the drill. The holes were then filled with powder and blasted to make the rock small enough to remove from the tunnel. To build a tunnel, holes were drilled into the layers of rock using a hand drill and hammer. At an eight-mile-long bend in the Greenbrier, the railway decided to build a 1.5-mile tunnel through the mountain instead. Coming into West Virginia, the railroad followed the Greenbrier River. The men who worked on the railroad were primarily former slaves. The C&O terminus at the Ohio became the town of Huntington, WV. The Chesapeake_& Ohio_Railway began in 1870 to link Richmond with the Ohio River. The legend of John Henry begins in southeast West Virginia near the town of Talcott at the Big Ben Tunnel. Like Paul Buyan for lumberjacks or Casey Jones for railroad engineers, John Henry was the great legend for those men that laid the tracks and build the tunnels for American railroads. John Henry is one of the great working-man legends of America from the late 1800s. This week please read chapter 9, The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer, and chapter 10, Sunday Morning Coming Down of Richard Beck’s book Trains, Jesus, and Murder – The Gospel According to Johnny Cash.
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