Johnny Appleseed — Traditional Folktale

Traditional Folktales in the Classroom

Johnny Apple Seed and Apple Jack

America has a rich tradition of folk heroes.

The real Johnny Appleseed was John Chapman September 26, 1774 - March 11, 1845 who spread apples for the purpose of creating cider orchards.

According to the Explore Pennsylvania website, Chapman: Created nurseries by clearing areas of scrub and building brush fences to protect the developing “whips,” as the young trees were called, from deer and other animals. As the whips grew, he camped nearby in a wigwam-like structure and busied himself by weeding his orchard, mending the fence, starting other nurseries, or visiting frontier families. And depending on his assessment of a person's ability to pay, he sold, traded, or simply gave away his little apple trees. When he had no more seedlings, or simply decided it was time to move on, he headed west. While some depict him as giving away apples, Chapman was essentially a businessman.John Chapman frequented Western Pennsylvania.

The American Whiskey Trail :
By the mid-1790s, around the height of the Whiskey Rebellion . Origins of Hillbilly Music / Story Roots of Moonshine Whiskey Rebellion and the Amber Waves of Grain. Chapman lived in a cabin on Grant's Hill in Pittsburgh, where he tended an orchard. Inspiration struck after noticing the German cider mills south of the city. He gathered left over apple seeds from the cider mills' pumice stones and sold them to settlers. This idea quickly led to Chapman's nickname of “Johnny Appleseed. "
Chapman's sole purpose in planting apple trees was not for the purpose of supplying the settlers with wholesome snacks along the way. Most of the apples he planted were used in the making of cider and distilling apple brandy and applejack. Apples grown from seeds are usually too sour for eating out of hand and were mainly used for this purpose.

Apple Jack - the natives call it Jersey Lightnin' - Heritage Tradition

Apple Jack - the natives call it Jersey Lightnin' - Heritage Tradition heard about in the movie:
From Stolen Life starring Betty Davis

In this romantic melodrama, Bette Davis plays twin sisters for the first time (she would do so again in 1964's Dead Ringer). Kate Bosworth (Davis) is a sincere, demure girl and talented artist. Her twin sister Pat (also Davis) is a flamboyant, man-hungry manipulator.

Unlike aged apple brandies, this white lightning is produced by a process known as “jacking,” in which cold temperatures work to separate the water and alcohol by taking advantage of their different freezing points. The water freezes into ice and is strained out of the mixture while the ethyl alcohol remains liquid, resulting in a higher alcohol concentration.Applejack was an old standby of the early colonists and, also known as “Jersey Lightning,” was favored during Prohibition for its comparative ease of home brewing. A local affectionate name in New England for applejackwas “essence of lockjaw.”

By 1685, New Englanders settling in New Jersey were busy establishing apple cultivation on a large scale. Cider had been their favorite drink. It could be fermented for a hard cider or fermented and distilled to make brandy, or if you prefer, Jersey Lightning. A method popular in New England was simply to freeze the cider and discard the ice. Some of the cider was made into vinegar which was used in cooking and preserving.

The Ideal Bartender, Tom Bullock, 1917 JERSEY LIGHTNING COCKTAIL

Use large Mixing glass; fill with Lump Ice.

Whole Story By Tamara Scully

Apples were big business in Randolph, and the surrounding areas of Morris County, since the Revolutionary War times. As a matter of fact, most of today's housing developments were probably once apple orchards. The soil and terrain here were suitable to orchard crops, and apple and peach orchards were prevalent.

Bill Wilkie, a railroad and history buff from the Mendham area, presented this intoxicating lesson in local history to a crowd of 40 or so people gathered in the community room of the Randolph Township Free Public Library. According to Wilkie, many families produced an excess of
apples, even after making pies, canning and drying the fruit, and storing some of the crop for winter consumption.
There wasn't much of a local market for apples - everyone grew them- and the fruit would get damaged in transit to more urban areas which, at that time, were served by Bergen County farms.
With apples readily available, cider was routinely processed. It was the main beverage of choice for colonial Americans. Water was not readily accessible, and because of water-borne illnesses, it was not
always safe.
Hard cider had a long shelf life, so it was always available, well after the harvest. It was the beverage, consumed by all
members of the family, to quench thirst.
Enterprising businessmen took cider a few steps further.
First, as sweet cider fermented, hard apple cider was produced. Hard cider was about 60 proof. When a second distillation was made, the resulting 120 proof liquor was then diluted down to 100 proof, and the barrels aged. The result was an 80 proof product that, when bottled, became known as Apple Brandy, or Apple Jack, or "Jersey Lightning ." A booming business was born, Wilkie said.
"Farmers would take their apples to the cider mill, and the mill owner would keep a percentage of the juice in payment. To distill
that juice in to Jersey Lightning was to make a sought-after product from a commonplace staple. It was big business."
Entertaining them with a slide show to accompany his commentary, Wilkie kept the audience's attention as he explained the lore of Jersey Lightning.
The legal distiller had to pay the tax man . And, he had to pay taxes on all of the 100 proof liquor he made, Wilkie explained.
"Unfortunately, that meant that he was paying for alcohol that wouldn't exist when the product was finished and ready for sale."
"Government measures how much you make at 100 proof and levies a tax at the time its made," Wilkie explained. However, the product is then aged for 3-7 additional years, and by that time, a good amount of
evaporation has occurred. That taxed product that later evaporated was known
to distillers as the "angel's share," Wilkie said.
The distiller also had to store his barrels in a special structure, with steel doors and indows, which became known as a "Lincoln
house". This was to ensure that no one ould get to the product before the tax man levied the appropriate taxes. A certificate of axation was then affixed to the barrels with a tack and shellacked in place.
Apple Brandy was "one of the largest industries in the state of New Jersey from the early 1800s through to the Civil War, " Wilkie stated.
With major stage-coach routes between Easton, Pa and the ports of New Jersey and New York ity running through Morris County, Jersey Lightning found markets elsewhere. Unlike the raw product, apples, the liquor would not bruise or rot during the arduous trips. Because the route took more than one day to traverse, travelers would have to stay overnight in local inns.
"They were served Jersey Apple Jack."
That, stated Wilkie, is how the reputation of the local apple brandy spread, and how "Jersey Lightning" became known far and wide.
Civil War to Prohibition
"The fame of the New Jersey Apple Brandy became known and it became, between 1804 and the ivil War, the largest cash crop in New Jersey," Wilkie said. According to the 1830 census, here were 388 legal
distilleries in New Jersey. Fifty-three of those were in Morris County, and four of those were in Randolph ownship. Nearby Roxbury Township had dozens more, and Chester had five. unterdon and Warren Counties ere also home to many distilleries.
During the Civil War, the government imposed a very high $2 per barrel tax on the Apple Jack. Coupled with the loss of business from the southern states, distillers were hit ard. And railroads made the
stage-coach routes all but obsolete.
Following the war, the use of alcohol in the United States more than quadrupled, according to ilkie, perhaps offsetting some of the loss of business and profits the distillers had suffered. This, however, set
the stage for the next era in the saga of the distilleries: Prohibition. The 18th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1919, ushered in the age of Prohibition, and no distillery was legal.
Lasting 14 years, Prohibition was an era of illegal distilleries, many of which undoubtedly were found here in Morris County. At least one known mill, that on Route 4 in Ralston, did stop its production
around the time of Prohibition. It's machinery was left relatively unchanged since then. Inside, the belts, pulleys, and presses remain. The mill, recently acquired
by Mendham Township, produced Tiger Apple Jack, from approximately 1906-1920.
Some distilleries and Lincoln ouses found new uses following the demise of the Jersey Lightning heyday.
On Route 24, near Parker Road in Chester, Wilkie reports that the stone house, now a vicarage for the Episcopal Church, was once a distillery. It was known as the Mountain Spring Distillery, and its incoln
house remains intact on an adjacent property. The most prominent of the Randolph distilleries is also now a home. At the intersection of Park Avenue and Sussex Turnpike, in the Ironia section of the township, is the Bryant Distillery.
Now a beautifully restored home, the Landmarks Committee of Randolph Township has honored it with a plaque.
The location of the other distilleries is not certain. It is known that about 1,000 gallons of apple brandy were legally made in
Randolph Township during the days of Jersey Lightning. Most evidence of such production as long since disappeared.
Jack Hopkins found the presentation enlightening in many ways. "It was an interesting talk that ombined some local
history with a look at some of the economic realities in colonial New Jersey," he stated.
Another audience member, John Oehler, was unaware of the legacy of Apple Jack distillers in Randolph Township. "I had to attend the recent resentation at the Randolph Library to find out. I was not disappointed with the history lesson and
great presentation," he said. The person responsible for scheduling these popular
presentations is Deborah Rood Goldman, the programming manager at the
library.

John Henry — Traditional Folktale

John Henry Folktales in the Classroom

John Henry TRADITIONAL FOLKTALES Story Telling, The Oral Tradition,
Ballads, Folkmusic, and Folktales used in the classroom.

• FOLKSONG HISTORY and RELATED RESOURCES
• STANDARDS
  FOR FOLKLIFE EDUCATION ANDFOLK MUSIC
• Nursery Rhymes Tell Stories
• National Children's Folksong Repository
  Children's playground songs and rhymes are telling their story .

The Ballad John Henry - Etymology of Rock n' Roll
The song is about a terrible kind of accident or crime. It's a mourning song, a hammer song, a work song. Tunnel work in the 1870s was widely recognized as the most dangerous and nastiest job. You needed some sort of force to get people to do that work. African Americans went westward as workers, both as slave laborers and free men and women laborers between 1870-1885.

Listen to The Ballad John Henry sung by John Cephas award winning Blues folk artist.
video

JOHN HENRY FOLK SONG
From: John Garst Thu, 1 Dec 2005
Subject: "John Henry" on TV ca 1960?
I have just received from the West Virginia Department of Archives and History a copy of the first page of a letter typewritten to Kyle McCormick, who was probably then director of the Archives. This page bears no date and no signature. No other page could be found.
The letter begins by thanking McCormick for his "long and informative and extremely helpful letter in response to my questions regarding the John Henry." I suppose that "the" was inserted or "legend" omitted inadvertently.
It goes on to assure McCormick, "It is my hope that no one in my script will appear a burlesque creation." Evidently McCormick had expressed concern about the way in which TV had depicted West Virginians in other broadcasts.
The letter discusses the significance of the John Henry legend. At the bottom of the page the author states that his setting will be Big Bend Tunnel, West Virginia, and that he hopes to present "a realistic character (no twenty pound hammers) who is fallible in" ... page ends.
In 1957 Kyle McCormick was Director, West Virginia Department of Archives and History. On Nov. 4, 1957, he issued a press release on the subject of John Henry. This press release was published in the Parkersburg (WV) Sentinel on Thursday, Nov. 7, 1957, and from that source it is quoted in full on p 56 of Singa Hipsy Doodle and other Folk Songs of West Virginia (Marie Boette, editor; Junior League of Parkersburg, Inc., Parkersburg, WV, 1971).
The essence of McCormick's press release is that records fail to show that steam drills were ever used at Big Bend Tunnel and that there was a steel-driving contest. Even so, "a strapping big Negro named John Henry (Martin) who weighed 275 pounds" was employed as a driller there. He was paid $1.50/day instead of the usual $1.25. "He had a son who became a prominent Negro educator."
That the legendary John Henry was John Henry Martin was indicated to Guy B. Johnson by several of his informants. My suspicion is that when the ballad reached the Big Bend area, people there remembered John Henry Martin and he became the second legendary steel driver named "John Henry."
In 1957 some of the records of the C & O construction were owned by grandsons of James Twohig, "contractor's foreman on the Big Bend job." It is these and other records on which McCormick's statements are based.

Review of Digging Deep for the Real 'John Henry'
By Jennifer Howard The Chronicle Section: Research & Publishing Volume 53, Issue 23, Page A13
The songs sung about John Henry say he knew, when he was a little baby sitting on his mother's knee, that a hammer would be the death of him. They say he grew up strong and drove steel on the railroad. And they agree that one day he took that hammer and raced a steam drill. The drill made it only nine feet into the rock. The man drove in 14 feet and then collapsed, calling for a cool drink of water before he died.
Now a historian believes that he has found the flesh-and-blood man behind that legend. Scott Reynolds Nelson, an associate professor of history at the College of William and Mary, thinks he knows where John Henry fought the machine, won the battle, and died with a hammer in his hand. The historian thinks he also knows where the man lay buried for more than a century, as tales of his heroic feat traveled across the land.
Mr. Nelson lays out his case in Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (Oxford University Press). Aimed at a general readership, the book tells a nifty historical detective story. It begins with the historian and his dog driving west just as the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway did in the 1870s toward the hard mountains on the Virginia-West Virginia border, following the tracks of a legend.
Mr. Nelson published some of his findings in a 2005 article in the journal Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. Now his book takes that scholarship and spins it into a tale that combines highly specialized historical knowledge, needle-in-a-haystack archival work, and a first-person narration that historians rarely dare to use.
Whether or not one accepts his thesis some rival investigators do not Mr. Nelson's work demonstrates what can happen when a historian applies the tools of his trade to subject matter traditionally reserved for folklorists and bluesmen. It hammers home the idea that historical detail can be just as compelling as a legend and, like legends, can still require a leap of faith.

"John Henry" is the quintessential workingman's song. It's about steel and muscle and power and about working until you drop. In Work Songs (Duke University Press), the musician and music historian Ted Gioia writes, "It is the song in which all of these themes come to a head: the inroads of automation, the mythical power of the tool, the idealization of manual work, and the inherent dignity of labor as well as its dangers and degrading circumstances."
The exact origins of "John Henry" lie deep within the late-19th-century railroad tunnels of the American South. But Mr. Nelson's work builds off a century's worth of investigation and speculation about the song and the man behind it, much of it by folklorists.
Scholars first collected versions of the song in the early decades of the 20th century, at which point the narrative had already branched out into dozens of sometimes contradictory versions. Two rival studies from the 1920s and 1930s still stand as the main sources of oral testimony about John Henry. In 1929, Guy B. Johnson, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, turned the results of his inquiries into John Henry: Tracking Down a Negro Legend. Louis W. Chappell, a professor of English at West Virginia University, collected testimony from 1925 on, with a special emphasis on the area around Big Bend, W.Va., and published the results in 1933 as John Henry: A Folk-Lore Study.
"We really don't know what was sung about John Henry before the 1900s, and what we do have from the 1910s is fragments," says Norm Cohen, author of Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (University of Illinois Press, 1981), which remains the authoritative work on railroad ballads and lore.
The song most likely took shape in the 1870s or 1880s, probably first as a hammer song, which railroad tunnelers used to pace themselves as they bored through solid rock. In his book, Mr. Gioia describes the bone-splintering work that building railroads required in 19th-century America: "The hammer was used primarily to drive spikes and to drill rock in preparation for exploding charges of powder. The latter task required a rhythmic coordination between two laborers, one holding and turning the drill and the other handling the hammer."

Etymology of Rock n' Roll

Folklorists notably Archie Green , author of Only a Miner, which was published by University of Illinois Press in 1972 have argued that rock 'n' roll goes back to the rhythmic exchanges between the hammer man and his shaker, who held the drill and rolled it between blows.

Mr. Nelson attempts to track the song as it spread among railway workers and into the wider world, through different groups of workers, into the hands of scholars and the repertoires of performers.
As the song traveled and the legend grew, the more heroic the steel-drivin' man became. "Over time," Mr. Nelson says, "as trackliners think about the song, the idea of beating a steam drill seems impossible, and so John Henry becomes stronger and stronger, ... and a whole bunch of stories grow up about John Henry: that he was 10 feet tall, that he carried two 20-pound hammers."
African-American and Anglo-American musical traditions meet in different versions of the song. Mr. Cohen's Long Steel Rail points out lines (like "Who's gonna shoe your pretty little feet?," a question sometimes asked of John Henry's woman) that were borrowed from much older British ballads such as "The Lass of Loch Royal." And, he notes, a contemporary of Chappell's identified the standard John Henry tune as one often heard in the ballad "Earl Brand."
Mr. Nelson also hears African-American burial songs in many versions of "John Henry," as well as echoes of an Igbo tradition , brought over from western Africa by slaves, of songs designed to propitiate the souls of those who have died in extraordinary or terrible circumstances. By the historian's count, more than 200 recorded versions of "John Henry" exist.
In his book, he takes a close look at the song's performance and recording history. In 1924 a white performer named Fiddlin' John Carson , one of the earliest country singers, " merged fiddle traditions and black folks songs together " and made the first known recording of "John Henry." Blues singers, along with such figures as the poet, folk performer, and activist Carl Sandburg, and song collectors such as John and Alan Lomax , "rescued" and popularized it in the early decades of the 20th century.

Workin' on the Railroad

For many early American folklorists, Mr. Gioia (Irish Africa) observes, "seeking the 'real' John Henry was their 'holy grail' quest." It's a chase that has lasted almost a hundred years. In 1909 a Wellesley College student named Louise Rand Bascom reported a couplet she had heard in the mountains of her native North Carolina: "Johnie Henry was a hard-workin' man/ He died with a hammer in his hand." Mr. Nelson's pursuit of the man behind the mythic battle was slower to take shape. When he wrote his dissertation, on the history of the Southern Railway, the Chesapeake & Ohio's chief rival, he "was not really a railroad fan, which made it kind of tedious," he recalls. "But I learned how the construction happened, how the work happened, how tunneling worked."
The dissertation became Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 1999). In doing research for the book, he dug up reports of the board of the Virginia State Penitentiary in the Library of Virginia. The reports "told a terrible story about railroad work" done by inmates at the prison, he writes in Steel Drivin' Man. "In 1872, the worst year of its record, the board made a full report on mortality to the State Assembly. Forty-eight black convicts died in that year, or nearly 10 percent of the entire penitentiary."
The board asked the prison's surgeon to account for the deaths. More than half, he judged, had been caused by railway work. Deadly for the prisoners, that kind of labor must have been good business for the penitentiary, which in 1871-72 alone leased 380 black convicts to the C&O. (Mr. Nelson's account suggests that the going rate was 25 cents a day.)
Since his topic was the Southern line, not the C&O, Mr. Nelson set the report aside for a time. But four years later, in 1998, when he agreed to deliver a conference paper about songs used by railway workers, he came back to that material to reinterpret the railway work song to beat all railway work songs: "John Henry."
Initially, Mr. Nelson felt uneasy about using a song and its many variants as primary documents. He listened to dozens of recordings. He did close readings of verses. "Taking lyrics seriously to describe events that I know about in another way was strange," he acknowledges. He frittered away time, he says, trying to decode "crazy little phrases" in different versions. (" CC rider, " for instance, is a corruption of " easy rider ," a woman who rode the train free to visit a railway worker. )
Such work was "outside of my comfort zone as a historian," Mr. Nelson recalls. "I was a little between the place of the amateur blues scholar who writes for Rolling Stone and the professional music scholar who's looking at chord changes and tonal progressions and their relationship to a particular sound." Existing scholarship played down the gloomier twists in "John Henry." But Mr. Nelson's detailed knowledge of railroad construction and its hardships led him straight to those aspects. Snappy modern versions fail to convey that "the song is about a terrible kind of accident or crime," he says. "It's a mourning song."
Interpretations of the song as a paean to heroism or an exhortation to work hard also disturbed Mr. Nelson. "I was reading this material by folklorists, by musicologists, and it just didn't make any sense at all," the historian says. "Tunnel work in the 1870s was widely recognized as the most dangerous and nastiest job....You needed some sort of force to get people to do that work."
Hammer songs, he writes in Steel Drivin' Man, "cursed hard work, bosses, and unfaithful women. They predicted pain and death." Here is a verse from one version reproduced by Guy Johnson in his 1929 study:

• The hammah that John Henry swung,
  It weighed over nine poun',
  He broke a rib in his left-hand side,
  And his intrels fell on the groun'.
• Another version goes
  "This old hammer, huh
  Killed John Henry, huh
  Killed my brother, huh
  Won't kill me, huh
  Won't kill me, huh."

(Each "huh" marks a swing of the hammer.) As Mr. Nelson writes, "these were songs about escape or death, not exhortations to work hard like some hero out of the Iliad."

• They took John Henry to the white house,
  And buried him in the san',
  And every locomotive come roarin' by,
  Says there lays that steel-drivin' man,

Mr. Nelson believes that he has found the real John Henry, having tracked him from prison to tunnel to grave. Others say the evidence remains circumstantial. No first-person account of John Henry's contest with the drill has ever been unearthed. But that hasn't stopped scholars, all the way back to Johnson and Chappell eighty years ago, in the 1920s and 30s, from feeling fiercely territorial about their preferred versions of the story. Indeed, Chappell spent a good portion of his book taking shots at Johnson, whom he felt had stolen some of his work without giving credit where credit was due. "His marvelous freedom in handling this material would seem to call for an explanation of some sort," Chappell writes. "But his disregard of my rights is largely personal and need not require the attention of readers who are not interested in trifles...." Steel-Drivin' Man builds off years of Nelson's scholarship, but it does not have an extensive scholarly apparatus, just footnotes. That opens the author to the charge that he, too, does not acknowledge how high he stands on the shoulders of other scholars , and that he has not explained in detail where he thinks they went wrong.
"very passionate and historically wonderful.... He did some really interesting and original things." That accomplishment, however, also has a downside: "Nelson is all alone pursuing this quest, and he brings history and doing history alive," she says. "But to be true to this genre, he has to ignore others' contributions.... He doesn't really give credit to other people's discoveries or perspectives.... If he disagrees with other arguments, he might not mention them. He might have given more attention to Johnson and Chappell, or Archie Green , or Norm Cohen, or even me. But in reading his book, I often felt he was alone on his quest."
That dramatic approach has paid off for Mr. Nelson and his book, which has had enthusiastic reviews in The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, and elsewhere. Colleagues at William and Mary started calling him "Hollywood" after interest was expressed in turning the book into a feature film.
Ask Mr. Nelson what he thinks of other scholars' work on John Henry, and he is quick to acknowledge their influence on his research. rock 'n' roll riffs For instance, he mentions that his discussion of rock 'n' roll riffs off the folklorist Archie Green's work on miners' songs, a debt recognized in Steel Drivin' Man in an endnote. Of Ms. Williams's work, Mr. Nelson says, "I felt myself disagreeing with her about a lot of particulars, particularly in the 1870s," but "in retrospect I couldn't have written my book without the groundwork she lays out." Mr. Nelson's own book, unfortunately, does not have a bibliography, so readers must rely on endnotes, which condense a great deal of reading and research into a small amount of space.

Man vs. Man

Mr. Nelson's most vocal critic is an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Georgia named John Garst. A longtime student of American ballads, he champions the theory that John Henry fought the steam drill and died in Alabama in the early 1880s, a possibility that was raised but not fully explored by Guy Johnson decades ago. In 2002, Mr. Garst published an article in Tributaries, the journal of the Alabama Folklife Association, which lays out the pro-Alabama evidence. He took a close look at detailed testimony from one of Johnson's informants and identified likely locations of Alabama towns and tunnels connected with John Henry stories, locations that previous researchers had been unable to trace.
As Mr. Garst reads it, Mr. Nelson's theory "depends on a long string of assumptions, and I think several of them are dubious.... I don't think that finding a person named John Henry in the records has much significance in itself. He has no evidence that John William Henry, the convict laborer, was a steel driver. He has no evidence that he was a noted steel driver. A little bitty guy like that, it seems to me, would probably not be a contest winner in competitions with bigger and stronger men."
Mr. Nelson and Mr. Garst have traded swipes at each other on the History News Network 's blog and elsewhere. Mr. Garst sums up their disagreement this way: "Evidently he doesn't think much of my work, and I don't think his evidence is very good." Mr. Nelson says a friend compared the situation to the intelligent-design debate:

Other observers wonder whether John Henry shouldn't remain, at heart, a mystery. Ann K. Hoog, a folklore specialist at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress , has worked with many researchers, including Mr. Nelson and Mr. Garst. "There's nothing wrong with approaching an old ballad with new eyes," she says. But "you have to be careful when you're trying to be conclusive about this sort of material."
Folklorists call ballads like "John Henry" examples of "expressive culture," a study in how a group or groups of people communicate and transmit their experiences not the best medium for recording hard facts. Besides, Ms. Hoog says, "isn't it a little more interesting to keep it open?" Regardless, the search for the real John Henry has driven scholars for a century. Mr. Cohen judges Mr. Nelson's argument to be plausible but not unassailable.
But he also sees merit in Mr. Garst's work, and has been surprised by how much new information both scholars have been able to turn up over the past decade: "It's a testimony as to how much easier it is to do some kinds of research, now that so many things are available electronically."
Men died so that the railroads could carve their way through the landscape of the postwar South. In a sense, every one of them is John Henry. Mr. Nelson's findings humanize the legend; they do not diminish its pathos and its power. "I'm dying to find out the truth," Mr. Cohen says. "But I'm not sure I ever will."

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