John Henry and His People: The Historical Origin and Lore of America’s Great Folk Ballad by John Garst

West Virginians are gonna hate this book whose sole purpose is to argue that John Henry challenged a steam steel drill with his muscles in an Alabama railroad tunnel, fifteen miles east of Birmingham. It includes chapters on the case for West Virginia alongside chapters on the case for Virginia and Jamaica, as if they are comparable! You gotta admit, there is a lot of railroad and music and African American history in this book. “John Henry and His People is the definitive work on the most famous ballad of all time. With eloquent prose and a keen eye for detail, John Garst traces the history of the ballad and identifies both its location (the Oak Mountain Tunnel in Alabama) and its hero―John Henry Dabney, a black man born on the Burleigh Plantation in Hinds County, Mississippi. Generations of black and white musicians have sung about how John Henry drove steel into the mountain with his ten-pound hammer and beat the steel-driving machine. Thanks to John Garst and his fine book John Hen