Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which is a podcast that has some people on it. One of them is me. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. One of them is prop h prop.
Hey kill Joy continue to.
Body The worst part is this is several days later and we've stayed on zoom and prop has just been body rolling.
My back is killing me. Yeah, but I want to be known for committing to the bit. Yeah, you just you commit.
That's true, Sophie. Should I commit to the bit of pretending like your last name is podcast, It's not as good of a bit. Maybe it's not worth committing to. Sophie is our producer? What about produce Well? You could be produced well prod Well. How do well sounds like a name, Sophie Prodwell? That sounds sexual. I take it back, it does. Was sorry, she's cleaning her.
You're out right now right? Ian?
Your our fate is in your hands. It's up to you whether you leave that or cut that out. It's just Sophie, all right, Sophie. Uh yeah, Sophie's a producer. Ian is our audio engineer on woman song Hi end I almost.
Forgot and the body Roller. I'm not currently d the body Roll Prop the body roller, don't stop the body roll.
You can get body roll tattooed on your knuckles if you want.
Dog that's whatever.
Yeah, favorite things to do is to tell you what you could get tattooed on your knuckles.
Yeah, especially if it's four letters, you know.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, perfect, Yeah, perfect, Yeah, hilarious. On Woman has the person who wrote a theme song on Woman has an album coming out. New album coming out called Desire Paths out September twenty second. Prop has a new album that came out in June. I can't remember the name off the top of my head.
Terrorform the possibility that's right, is that the third in the trilogy? That was the fourth, the fourth four.
The trilogy in the quadrus something Yeah, yeah, the fourth and final man the opis the final, the opus minimis magnus the magnum p I.
Yeah, that's cool. People don't really do that much anymore. Like we're in a very like single culture let alone album culture let alone, a like arc.
Like this was a book and then the book had four EPs and a cold Brew. Yeah, you know, this was a four year process. I like that.
The cold Brew is the same name. It's good.
Yeah, man, same world.
Yeah, you gonna start a new killed terraform.
I mean I might as well.
Yeah that's what you need more more projects.
I absolutely need more. Yeah, so I do need more money. So does y'all subscribe to Cooler Zone Media?
That's sure? And where we last left off, this is Wednesday. If you've started, if you've been listening to the show, if this is your very first episode of the show, congratulations, you should go back one. For everyone else, Wednesday means it's the second part of a topic, and the topic we're talking about today is the fact that John Henry was a real last person, and he was a cool last person, and his legacy is cool as shit, although some of it's really messy, but not because of him,
but because of shitty people. So where we last left our hero he is convicted and he's been sent off to the Alleghany Mountains to dig through them. Will actually not dig through them, actually just a haul mud and shit away. But and they're running into this thing. They're able to automate everything except the drilling, or they're able to speed up everything except the drilling. And you know, they have dynamite. They have railroad cars now they just
need a better drill, enter the steam drill. The problem with steam engines for drilling and just kind of in general actually is that you need they're really big and convoluted and complicated. You need a boiler and you need an engine. They need to be near each other, and they need to be near where you need the power. You can't just strap an engine to a big old drill, as much people kind of tried, but not easy. You
have to transfer that power. Eventually, folks figure out how to use pipes to transfer the pressure using compressed air to power a drill. Basically, someone else made a diamond coded drill where the drill itself was like part of the engine. I don't know. Nineteenth century technology is wacky.
Yeah.
Both it sounds so difficult, yeah, and both broke down constantly. And you've got these old timey sales people running around being like, Hi, I'm an old timey salesperson. Would you like to purchase the latest technological marvel that'll increase your profits lately and murder just the absolute most workers possible.
It's the greatest, the latest and greatest.
That's right. And then the robber barons are like, yes, that sounds like two birds with one stone and sign me up. I would like to both drill into this mountain and kill these people.
If this dude dies, there's more people, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine, we get more, right, yeah.
Yeah. The amount of American history that is like literally tied into like quote unquote we hate immigrants, just kidding. We need immigrants so that they can die doing the following labor that no one who was born here wants to do, like.
The most bizarre, the just the most toxic, and just if we could just give the country a therapist, like just the most y'all just need therapy. It's so bizarre. And also like I mean speak yeah, I mean it's it's an obvious tangent that none of us need to go on because we already know. But I'm just like, and then the nerve, just the psychological malady of thinking
that it's the immigrant's fault. Yeah, that you know what I'm saying, Rather like you mad at the immigrant because you can't get a job because the people are willing are down to pay pennies. Yeah, you're not mad at the person that says that's gonna that wouldn't gonna pay you a livable wage in the first place. That's not the problem. The problem is the person that's willing to work for non livable I just don't understand, y'all. Math ain't math in.
No, and it's you were seeing that cartoon there's like the capitalists. He's sitting in front of a huge plate of cookies, and then there's like a white worker who has one cookie, and then there's a you know, a brown worker on the other side has no cookies, and the boss is like, careful, that man's trying to steal your cookie.
Yeah, like that. Yeah, that's just exactly that. It's exactly that.
Yeah. So before steam drills, when you tunnel through a mountain, you do it with humans and you do a dynamite well, originally black powder, but you have two man teams. Sometimes it's three men teams. It's a hammerman and then one shaker who holds the chisel in place, shifting the chisel between every blow to make sure it has a good bite into the rock.
Right.
That is called rolling. That is where rock and roll comes from. Almost certainly. I mean there's a lot of different people claiming different etymologies, but the argument I read in this history book is very convincing.
That is called body rolling. That's right, this whole time.
Absolutely, you're the roller, Sophie is the hammerman, and I am the third person. Actually, the third person on the team actually just sings. You actually don't want me to sing? You keep the rhythm. Yeah, no, that is what you do. That is what they sang to time everything involved, and sometimes there's a third man on the team literally just to sing.
That's interesting about rock and roll, man, Yeah, you said it was pretty convincing.
Yeah, because I'm going to talk about how all of this ties into two blues, right, which obviously comes before rock and roll. You know, it doesn't go straight from these hammer songs to rock and roll, But I know more about the blues at as a more known and totally rock and roll. If you look up the etymology, most of the etymologies that people say are actually more recent or they'll be like, oh, it comes back to sailors and they're like ships that are rolling or whatever.
But honestly, this is more convincing because this is because this is black culture. Yeah, like that, It's just much more convincing to me. So they chisel or drill holes then they pack them with gunpowder dynamite, and then they set it off. A lot of the digging actually in these tunnels was actually vertical because you drop shafts in from the top of the mountain, so you can dig from more than one or I guess two spots at once. Right, you want as many different places to dig from as
possible so that you can get it done fast. So they'll do like three, They'll drop three shafts and then dig all directions the conditions. Well, okay, so but when John Henry is first shipped out, he starts as a mucker. His job is loading broken rock and muck into railway cars. We know this because all of the people who were sent out that is their job, right, That is what
the prison laborers were doing. The convicts weren't used for the actual specialized hammering yet, and the conditions were This is going to shock you, they weren't very good.
Huh.
I know, you think that these people doing a dangerous job, we would hold them as a probably, I mean, they're doing a more dangerous job than the CEO, so they're probably getting paid more, right, But it actually wasn't the case.
Yeah, Yeah, it's pretty valuable to have you have a company. Yeah, you would think that most important part of the company is the people doing the work.
Yeah, you'd think that their overseer was a guy named Claiborne Mason who had previously built railroads overseeing shadow slaves, and now he's using oversee prison slaves. During the war, he'd been a slave master who worked to build bridges for the Confederate military. But he had a hobby. His hobby was hanging Confederate deserters and anyone suspected of helping them. He sucks. Okay, fuck this guy.
Imagine like that's the overseer from your old plantation. Yeah. Like you you're like, this is a ship job, but at least I'm not a slave. And then you get there and you're just like, what.
The Yeah, it's still the same guy.
Man ain't dead. How his man ain't dead. We went through the old last ward. His man ain't dead ship.
Because he did fight in the front lines. He did the safest work impossible in the war.
Why didn't you die slow?
Yeah. The tunnelers, who at this point are black and Irish and free, both sides are you know, free folks. They drink together and they swap songs at illegal Irish run whiskey shops in the evenings. The convict labor wasn't allowed to drink at except at the grog shop, which was owned by Claiborne Mason, the racist asshole. And is a way to get all basically a way to get all your money back, right, You drink away all your
wages and then it goes straight back to your boss. Now, I mean everyone else is drinking away their wages too, but at least it goes to another worker. You know. They built a bunch of railway tunnels. Historians used to think John Henry's tunnel was this one called big Ben Tunnel, and actually the nearby town there's a statue of him, which is cool, But it wasn't this tunnel, but I don't care. It's close enough. The rock there at big Ben Tunnel is fairly soft, and there's no evidence that
steam drills were ever used. There's actually specific evidence that they weren't used. The holes weren't big enough and shit. So Lewis Tunnel is the one that John Henry haunts. It is the second longest tunnel on the route. It is forty three hundred feet long, which is most of a mile. It goes through the hardest stone of any of the tunnels on that route, So it's where the
owners decided to try out these new steam drills. Hand labor was at the time digging about one point five feet of tunnel a day, and old i Amy salespeople were promising seven feet a day from the newest and greatest steam drill. So they got themselves some steam drills, and they were very prone to breaking down, and they weren't usable in all conditions, like if the tunnel was flooded, you can still make people go dig, but you can't make a machine go dig, you know.
Sheesh.
Yeah, parts were hard to source. They actually had to build entire boom towns devoted to their upkeep sometimes right like yeah, you need like boiler factories basically, and the bosses had a hard time keeping workers. The bosses I think they subcontracted a lot. They passed a rule that their contractors couldn't pay the employees more than a dollar
a day. So both the Irish workers and the free black workers, who were friends because they spent all their evenings drinking together, they were like, fuck, no, we demand two dollars a day. Which is all of like fifty dollars, that's what they were asking for. They're working ten to twelve hours of a day at like murder work, and they're like, yeah, we want fifty dollars.
To take that man. First of all, like just again, living in any other century had to be awful because I'm just thinking smell, I'm thinking temperature, and it's not like you had, like, you know, any sort of radar technology to when you just you're just gonna drop some dynamite into a rock that you standing on like this just this is just all of that sounds stupid to me, you know, and like and then secondly, I just I
am continually fascinated by. Me and my wife were just talking about this, like there's a like at the school that one of my children go to. Uh, there's a as an Irish lady there, and me and my wife are like, when you when you see an Irish, we see an Irish person, they kind of get it pass already,
you know what I mean. It's like how you gotta pass like you get it, you know, I mean, like you just kind of already feel like well you I mean, y'all kind of our cousins you know, and like so you just kind of like I just I've been just so fascinated by and I know that that like connection has been weaponized and has been used against us. But at the same time, like, but the lived experience, I just be like, like we talked about in the in the this last week so or that's this week's politics.
It's like yo, like Nat O'Connor, like y'all, she's squad, you know what I'm saying, Like you just look at him, like y'all kind of y'all man, y'all should have never been white people like y'all should have just y'all should have stayed one of us, you know.
And like it's funny because like overall, I would say that Irish people living in Ireland did performed way better about this than like Irish people in the US, especially local generations. But yeah, but yeah no, I I yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ones on the ones back home for y'all like really get it and like they're like, oh nah man man, yeah fuck all that we would chill. And I'm like, yeah, there.
Was an article, there's an episode we did recently about some ties between Irish resistance and Palestinian resistance, and like Palestinian folks would talk about like, oh, I go to Ireland and it's like I see Palestinian flags on the street, and like it is like a place where people actually respect me. And obviously Ireland is also struggling with all these like nativist fucks who are trying to get rid of a comorans wore right wing and yeah, you know
there's like fucking Nazis everywhere these days. But of course, but yeah, no, I I keep thinking about how how much right the history of the creational whiteness is the history of like trying to separate the working class from itself absolutely be like, hey, that guy's trying to do at your cookie and yeah, but the thing that I keep running across more and more is all obviously there's so many times where this worked, right. There's so many
times where poor white people immediately turned around. We're like I'm better than someone fuck fuck yeah you know, yeah, but there's all of these times when they didn't right, Like, yeah, these folks they just walked off. Yeah, they they quit together, like you know, they didn't even have There's often this moment where like the white workers leave and so they or go on strikes, so they bring in black strike breakers in order to use race to try and divide
the work with us. And then often actually those then the same black people come are like, oh, actually we're joining.
The strike, right, yeah, yeah.
And not always right, but but this time, I think, I think this is like kind of a it's almost this like throwaway line in the book I'm reading, but it's like one of the one of my favorite parts of this whole story that I wish I knew more about. They like, so they demand that something be done about the bad air in the tunnel. Yeah, And I'm not certain that they wanted two dollars a day, and I
don't think it was a strike. I think that they're like, all right, well, we're we're just gonna quit and go work somewhere else, like.
Like you, we don't, we don't have to do this, like yeah, yeah.
And the air and the Lewest Tunnel was bad because specifically, certain types of rock, if you blast into them with a steam drill, even more than hand drilling and even more than blowing it up, it creates silica dust. And this killed hundreds or thousands of railroad workers in West Virginia over the course of like sixty seventy years. It
doesn't kill you quickly. It's kind of closer to like something like black lung or something like that, and or asbestos or you know, basically anything you breathe in that you really shouldn't breathe in. It slowly destroys your lungs and then you're more prone to infection than you die.
Yeah, And.
So a lot of people died of miner's consumption, which was tuberculosis. But also like, oh, specifically related to all this shit, When drilling was done by hand, it doesn't put out as much dust. And also people weren't near the explodey bits because you tend not to stand next to an explosion as a general rule. Right, But the steam drills they just spit out dust, and so the tunnels had bad air, and the workers were right. They didn't know why they were right yet. They hadn't figured
this out yet, right. Hunting actually tried to higher indentured Chinese labor once all of his workers left, but it wasn't available that far east. He just couldn't get it, and he like was like trying to figure it out. He was like trying to like talk with like the assholes in mainland China who are selling people, and like he was like, and he just couldn't get Chinese labor, and he's like, fuck, what am I going to do? Where can I find people that I can pay fucking
nothing and send to their deaths? Yeah, the reformer Quaker guy had left the penitentiary and the new guy was even more hyped about convict labor. No more showing up to make sure the conditions are okay. So folks were forced to come out from the penitentiary and they started doing the actual drilling. And at this point probably is when John Henry became a driller, right, a steel driving man. And wouldn't it be great if they could just test the steam drills, like compared to a human, like which
one's faster? Really? You know, is it really?
Yeah? Is the juice really worth the squeeze? Because you know, as you're as you explaining this story, that's the whole thing I'm thinking about. I'm like, man, when don't you just cut your losses? This just obviously we have, you know, the hindsight of you know, two hundred years. But like I feel like if I was in this situation, like man, I don't know if this juice worth squeeze, yeah over
their yeah, you know. And and I'm like even as yeah, like you said, like you're trying to find I would be worried about the quality of work, especially if it's like you got these like you got just prison labor. I'm like, yes, people don't want to be here. They not paying attention. I'm just burning money, you know what I mean. I'm like, I'm just burning money here, Like so, I don't know that would.
Be but you're burning the state's money, not your money, to shade and they just keep providing it.
I was the piece I was missing. Oh well, if it's not my money, then I guess it's fine.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, Like the South is bankrupting itself in order to finance this kind of work and actually yeah, and actually they they don't shore it up right right, and eventually it like collapses and kills But this is like decades later, collapses kills most people, so now it's all bricked up. I might be conflating the other tunnel, Big ben Tunnel with Lewis Tunnel. I read about them both, but the same.
Point is it's obvious that at some point this is going to happen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So John Henry was never like I'm faster than any machine. An evil empire was like, hey, we want to run a cost benefit analysis, and you are not a free person, so you're going to do it for us.
Oh my gosh.
And this tunnel was built by one hundred and fifty men working day and night in three different shifts, cutting into the hardest rock anyone had ever dealt with. Most convicts, so it's mostly convicts now that everyone else was like, oh hell no. And they were working right next to the steam drill, so like in some versions of the song they're like steam drill on the left, Henry on the right. That's just true. There was like they were side by side competing, so they're just breathing in all
of that dust right the entire time they're working. And the hand drilling one it was more effective. New boilers weren't easy to get and they kept failing. So in eighteen seventy one, with the cost benefit analysis run, the machines left and the work was finished by hand. The twenty five cent a day convicts did the rest of the work, continuing for years after the Lewis Tunnel gave up on steam drills. Ten percent of the workers died any given year during the years that they took to
build this tunnel. John Henry probably died in eighteen seventy three. They didn't actually record as death. They literally wrote transferred. But that's what they did for everyone who died, because it was like transferred. I think it means like transferred out.
To the the work site. Passed.
Yeah, even those who moved off of the dot job site often died from the silica dust that they had already inhaled. Since they were convicts, they couldn't strike over the bad air like others had, and almost all of the workers who died were black men in their early twenties. No one recorded as death or exactly how he died, But yes, the race with the machine killed John Henry.
It took until nineteen sixty nine for the Coal Act to get past and for powered trills to be required of collars that limited the dust, and for workers to get masks. And there's a there's an old white building
referenced in some of the songs. They took John Henry to the White House and buried him in the sand in nineteen ninety two, before anyone had tracked down the real John Henry, the real story, right, A white house on the penitentiary grounds was knocked down and they found three hundred Yeah, and they found three hundred skeletons that had never been recorded of people whose death had never been recorded.
Oh my gosh.
And they were all clearly prisoners who died somewhere in the latter half of the nineteenth century. So John Henry's body was almost certainly.
Among them, most likely in there.
Yeah dang, But where his body wasn't was in advertisements. Sophie's Okay, that's the best transition I've ever done. You're right, man, the best I'm.
You're listen that, Yeah, ten points for finess.
I can get a machine. I can out podcast as AI.
Because look, I was locked in. I was like I was hanging on your everywhere right now, Like that one really got me most of the time, you know, when it's happening. I was like, I can't even go along with the bit I was locked in, Like where was his I was like, yeah, he's probably, Yeah, he's probably in that tunnel, man, are you probably in that thing under the white eyes? But you know, where he not though I was like, probably not in the it's like, oh no.
Yeah, well he's probably not in these ads, but here they are anyway, unless you were subscribed to coolers on media, in which case you just get the address.
And you just hear us go and we're back.
And we're back. So these deaths aren't mentioned anywhere else except the internal reports from the prison. There's no newspaper articles, no company reports, no private letters, no politicians talking about it on the floor of the Senate or whatever the fuck. Even though these reports were given to the Senate, right, they just didn't look or care. And the thing that's so interesting to me about this the no newspaper's bit.
It shows collusion between ostensibly competing companies because the competing railways had bought all of the newspapers in Richmond pretty much to talk shit on the CNO. Because CNO, like the railroads are big fucking business, right, yes, and so they would have loved to have dirt on someone unless it's something that they're like, no, there's nothing wrong with that. We can't we can't have people like care about dead convicts.
Just so here's the thing we could we could talk shit about them, Yeah, and how everybody that worked there'd be dying. But counterpoint, Yeah, except yeah, that may make them invest us investigate on us. Yeah yeah. Wow.
So one thing that is cool though, a bunch of folks managed to escape the work camps and go into the mountains.
Yeah, I'm waiting on the cool people that did cool stuff. Part.
It's of this, honestly, It's like it's kind of the he his legacy is cool, like.
What yeah yeah did with him?
Yeah, Like, and it's interesting because it's a less political cool people and it's more about like all of this stuff about music and all this other stuff that we'll get to. But like but yeah, no, it's like people got out and some people died. Like I don't know what percent of the ten percent who died were people trying to get out, right, But it would make a lot of sense to try and get free of this fucking situation.
Yeah.
The first time I came to West Virginia as an adult, I was doing flood relief work, mountaintop removal. Coal mining was trashing everything. It was causing whole towns to be evacuated because of coal dust. So all this shit still happens, you know, and the bare hills led to all these flash floods that fucked up all these towns, right, And so I went to one of these towns and was just like literally helping muck out people's basements and shit.
And I talked with all these old miners and they told me with pride that the history of West Virginia, of the mountaineers, they probably said Hillbillies, was the place where enslaved people, poor white people and indigenous people like where everyone ran to, you know, and that their like heritage was that they had swapped cultures and fucked.
Yeah.
And there's some myth making there, and there's like some hyperbole, right, but only some the mountains are where people go to be free.
Yeah, And.
So some of the tunnelers escaped in the mountains and it makes me fucking happy.
That's kind of rad.
Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Immediately, John Henry became John Henry became a symbol and was immortalized in song. And he was imortalized in three different ways. And none of these are written yet. It's going to be decades of forty almost fifty years before it gets written down. There's miner song, there's prison labor song, and there's railroad workers song, and they're all different and they're all really cool. Roughly, this era is when coal mining really takes off in Appalacha,
especially in West Virginia. Steam engines have been recently shifted from wood to coal, and so all these new steam engines were powering the modern world, and they need coal. The Welsh coal miners had a tradition of singing ballads while working, like everyone sings song, yeah, time work right, but does so differently with very different styles of song, very different rhythm, like you know. And so a lot of black rail workers stuck around the area after you know,
all these tunnels and joined them in the minds. And so the two cultures bled into one another, and John Henry became a ballad. And the Welsh ballads were not happy songs. They were songs about death. They were songs about dying, and they were songs about premonitions of death. So in this version of John Henry, it's a mournful song of a man who knows his sad destiny to
die with a hammer in his hand. That's the line from this part that stays in the modern versions, right, And it was set to a tune from the fifteen hundreds from Across the Ocean, and it was a slow song because the moral of the story of this song is don't work yourself to death over you know, like,
don't let the word bullshit. Yeah, since work is done to the pace of the songs, singing a slow song kept people working at an even measured pace, right really yeah, yeah, people are fucking smart, you know.
Yeah.
Like minor songs were also songs about how evil bosses were and about how women are cheat or bad. This is going to tie into some blue shit too, although that's less from the Welsh ballad stuff. That's more from what we'll talk about later with the anyway, with the hammer songs, these are songs about how everything hurts and then you die. The earliest John Henry songs are about a man who struggled and died a horrible death, about
how he still was alive underground, haunting the living. Basically, the earliest John Henry songs are creepy full car songs, which is coolest shit. I really liked all that shit. Yeah.
Up until the nineteen thirties, a lot of black workers wouldn't go near the Cno Canals tunnels at night because of his ghost, and supposedly this possibly goes back to West African especially Igbo traditions about those who die suddenly or terribly often like live underground, and their spirits have to be warded off, right, Yeah, Singing is one of the best ways to ward off these spirits. And I think that's coolest shit because singing is one of the
best ways to conquer fear. So the idea of like baking that into your culture where you're.
Like, yeah, it's Igbo, Yeah, okay, cool, it is ego.
Yeah, and so John Henry exists in this sense and like I'll actually just literally believe it. There's no part of me that's like, well, no, he doesn't haunt these tunnels, Like no, like literally, these songs are proof that he haunts these tunnels. Everyone remembers that these yeah, exactly, Yeah, totally okay. So then convict laborers picked this song up too as a hammer song. Hammer songs tended to be
less narrative. They instead had short lines punctuated by a hunh, which was for swinging the hammer right at the end of each line, and one of the themes of the John Brown one, the John Brown Hammer Song, is you know how like racist white people are terrified of the black man as like physically powerful. Yeah, this is a song about a black man killed for his physical might. And it is a black power song but like black power and a raw physical athletic power song, and how
it terrified white men. The other way that prisoners were using it was it got picked up as a fiddle song for hodowns in like Kentucky and shit in the Hills of Kentucky where go? Yeah, black and white, black and white kids in the at least the town that I'm reading this particular story about black and white kids went to school together until it was outlawed, Like segregation was like forced into this part of Appalachia in nineteen
oh four. So before that, and kids who grew up doing this, white and black ex convicts would play versions of John Henry John Henry on banjo, and they would do it right outside of jails so that prisoners could sing it too.
That's dope.
You have a fucking hodoun outside the prison.
Yeah, yeah, ban Joe just unite in us.
Yeah, both of these styles are songs are still around, and there's still John Henry songs in those styles, right, But the themes of John Henry that we currently have. When I first learned the story, I was convinced that, like John Henry is like a hard worker who you know, was like proud and shit. I was like, I was convinced I was gonna be like some shit some capitalists try to sell people on uh huh, it actually isn't okay.
The third version of these songs comes from another yet another black culture, or another culture of black workers, the track liners.
Okay.
One of the reasons that the South lost to the Civil War was that their supply lines were shit because their railroads were shit. They were all different gauges, nothing was standardized. They didn't have much industry, so building the railways in post Civil War South took an awful lot of work. Some of that was convict labor, but an awful lot of that was free black labor called the track liners. These were roving gangs of workers, mostly young,
single black men. The crews were actually racially integrated. I don't think like white workers were in the minority, but I don't believe that it was like, oh, you have like a white gang and a black gang, and most of the gangs are black. I believe it was actually Most of the gangs were mostly black, but had white makers in them as well. And so these gangs, right, the rail gangs, they're proud only the strongest men could track line. And they seem to be freelance crews. They
weren't incredibly well paid. They were paid better than a lot of other people, right, but they were freelance crews of eight to fourteen men. They got paid cash instead of script like so many other workers. Right, And so you could go do this job and then come back and be like.
I'm home with some money. Yeah.
And so it's incredibly hard, physically demanding work that paid better than other jobs. It was still shit compared to what you know, rich people get, but it was livable rather than starvation wages. One person's job on the gang. I hope they rotated, but maybe they didn't. I don't know. Maybe one person is just a good singer. One person's job is the caller who sings, and they time everything
as they're like digging up railroad tracks. Yah. Yeah, and it literally, like, I mean, it prevents physical injury to have everyone pull at the same time. Right of their songs are like literally just like you know, women are hot in their underwear, Am I right? You know?
Yeah, And.
A lot of their songs are like, hey, we're strong and proud. This rules their Their nickname besides the track Liners was the Gandy Dancers, since their work looked almost like dancing, and Gandy was the manufacturer of lots of their tools. The work wore you down. Most track Liners retired in their early thirties to go take up and you know that like classic, easy, not physically demanding job like farming. That's how are these motherfuckers were?
You are tougher men than I am.
That's your's your that's your retirement. Yeaheah, Early, I'm gonna go be a farmer. Yeah, because these days farming is like the definition of hard work.
Yeah, there's nothing harder than this. Yeah.
Uh. Fortunately they had a new and mention the track Liners to help them cope with the pain drug cocaine.
Yeah, at least we can get.
And so they saw sang John Henry too, and they sang it as a ballad like the miners, but to them it was an inspiring story about the kind of stuff they were into, being strong as fuck and being better than any fucking machine. It was an inspiring story about a giant, strong black man who could work hard as fuck, just like they were working hard as fuck. So this is the hustle culture John Henry or the
Tall Tail Hall John Henry. These were guys who at night, they you know, they've been working all day, so they get together and do physical feats of strength as their main like competition. And I would call that a pissing contest, except they also had literal pissing.
They also had those. Yeah, Doug, these guys are insufferable, man, I know, like the.
Probably I don't want to be one, but you know at all.
Yeah, like you can have it, buddy, Yeah, you can have it. Yeah, I'm just going I'm just going to rail this cocaine and yeah, watch you guys lift shit.
Hey, I'll be the singer again. Yeah, I'll just sing, Yeah, I keep rhythm. Yeah, oh crap, I can't do it. So there's three versions of the song now, right, there's the minor song, the convict song, in the track liner song. With all these subversions of the song. Already, this is what folk culture does, which fucking cool. Yeah, folklorists like conscious academic folkloress. So I'm not trying to talk shit on but they conflated them all back together in the
early nineteen hundreds. Then these songs kind of started all the genres, or at least were present at the start of all the genres. It's less that they hooks up, we'll get okay. So white America has always been hungry for black culture, especially music.
Yeah.
Yeah.
In the eighteen forties, about twenty percent of free black men in the northern cities, like who had that were written on official shit whatever their jobs were, like musicianear as their job description, and so often like you know, traveling folks doing songs, and also comedy was a big part of that too, And so the late eighteen hundreds and early nineteen hundred saw a lot of these people
as wandering musicians. By the eighteen nineties, white medicine show people like people did medicine shows who were white, figured out that black songs were how you draw customers white and black into your tent to sell them snake oil. By the nineteen twenties, the proto blues musicians black street performers were recording versions of John Henry Hammer songs became the blues when the home was dropped out of the song, replaced with an unvocalized pause, which is I guess called
a a say zura. And yeah, I realize I'm now probably getting in the territory have at least as much knowledge.
Yeah, I get I know a little bit. But this stuff's dope, dude, Like if you just enjoy music, just the musicality of it, because like, yeah, the hammer song, like and you guys, like a listener is like you have you actually have more of a picture. You have an idea of how this sounds already, you know, just to even just you remember, for this kid, that's the sound of a man working on a chain, huh, you know what I mean. So when you remove that and
it's just m m m. Yeah. Now now it's in the blues because you took out the huh, it's just the downbeat of the of the bass.
Yeah, burn burn.
Yeah, it's it's dope. I love it. Yeah.
No, And they like you know, they replaced like a thump on the body of the guitar instead of the hammer and like yeah, and these were first played in the juke joints and roadhouses of the rail workers. Then it found its way into cities for rent parties, which were basically benefit shows and potlucks for people falling behind on rent. And John Henry was an early classic of
this stuff. These are almost exclusively a black audience. White folks, even working class white folks at this point, were like walking around humming operas, still in like the Tenets. Yeah, and this doesn't last long. It it's the Blues. It's kind of better. Yeah, like, yeah, just sorry, survival of the fittest here. But yeah, yeah, so it's white leftist picking up on the Blues and John Henry that gives us Superman. But we'll get to that later.
Okay, okay.
For sort of double the weird white fetishization of black suffering blind black men in particular were all the rage. Most of these blind musicians only recorded a song or two and then died in poverty. They in particular, started tying John Henry to the story of Samson from the Bible, the strong Man. Yes, he was blinded and enslaved by the Philistines, and he prayed to God for one final feat of strength, then collapse the empathy that he was
chained in killing his slavers alongside of him. It's not hard to imagine why, Yeah, people make this connection. This is how I get into the Like you're like, well, how is this story about cool people did cool stuff? It's like, yeah, it's like Samson was cool, right, Samson's pretty rad.
Yeah, and like John.
Henry was cool even though it yeah, even though involved as death.
Yes, yes, yes, I'm seeing it now. Once as we're getting into this part, I'm like, oh I get it.
Yeah yeah. And black soldiers in France in World War One brought the blues and jazz with them. They were also treated better than they were at home because France passed a law that even on US army basis, no one was allowed to be racist pieces of shit in France, Like you're in our fucking country now, which is funny even now that race. France is like a perfect racism free society. But like it's not hard to be better than the US.
No, it was like the bar, the bars, the bars in hell, like the bar couldn't be lower. Yeah, but yeah, like my who I feel like my patriots saying is James Baldwin. Is him talking about going to France and being like, yeah, oh I'm a human here, like yeah, just like that simple, Like well, I mean I feel like a human. Yeah, didn't he stayed there, right, he was like yes, yeah, he was like, why hear what? I go back?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so so France now certainly has a lot of this black culture stuff, but you know what else is trying to sell probably black culture to absolutely today's advertisers.
Absolutely, yes, I was ready for this one.
And we're back. So internationalists and leftists in Europe starts spreading US black culture across the country continent Europe. It starts spreading across across Europe. Hobo's in the US pick up John Henry songs of course too, and from there it entered the growing folk music tradition of the United States and cultural appreciation. Appreciation and appropriation are hard to sort out. But there are times where it's obviously the
bad one. Yeah, some of these ones, I'm like, I don't know, I'm not really in a good position.
Yeah, jud sometimes you really got to Sometimes it's like you really got to be there because there's like a lot of like a nuance about the moment that maybe you're not catching. And then there's other times, yeah, like if you're in the situation to where like it just don't it just don't feel right, Like this just don't don't feel right? Yeah, but yeah, go ahead.
No, yeah, So this is the this is the most obvious example of it being bad. How John Henry became one of the first recorded country songs.
Oh yep, there it is.
Yeah, I heard of this guy. I hadn't heard of him. But I'm not a big country music fan. I try not to hate on any given genre, right, but there's like some genres where I okay, if I like the mediocre song in a genre, I like that genre.
Right, I like that. That's a good way to say it.
And so I like the standout country songs, but I like the mediocre hip hop songs and I like the meat. That's a good way to put it all songs.
Yeah, that's a good way to put it, because, like you have like for a country song, if it's not like Ray Charles, like, it's gotta be like exceptional. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, go on.
The first country singer widely considered the first country singer is a man named Fidland John Carson.
Got me no clue. Never heard those words said together.
I almost wish I wasn't bringing him up. He is a racist, piece of shit and a poser. He grew up in black culture. His first job was as a water boy to black workers on the railroad in Georgia, and so he was steeped in black worker music. He went he learned to play fiddle in Atlanta, famously not rural place.
Yeah.
He was one of the first members of the second incarnation of the klu Klux Klan, the one that formed in nineteen fifteen, which was like whatever costplaying as the originals.
Yeah they're not funny ones.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He immediately started lying and saying that he was from some like white, whitest fuck place and that he's only ever been into white shit any of these like rural as fuck. That is like his thing now. And he goes around and he supports all the racist like politicians and shit. He's like, he's the guy who comes and plays at your fucking you're a racist politician going around on the stump or whatever. He's the guy who comes
and plays for you. Fidland, John Carson, And so you know how we have this problem in modern pop music where there's some piece of shit country stars who lie about their origins and pretend to be all rural but are actually suburban and urban. And then are racist. Yeah, yeah, like the try it in a small town guy.
Oh yeah, yeah origin story.
Yeah, that is a that's a tradition that goes back one hundred years.
Where your accent from bro, you from Cleveland Homeboys? Hilarious.
John Arson was the first person to press a record that was called Country. He was also the first person to press a record that was like released and publicly available called John Henry. He stripped out the fact that John Henry was a black man. Also, at one point, with his music, he managed to lead to the lynching of a Jewish man because he wrote a song about an accused Jewish murderer and who like killed a white woman, I mean was a white Jewish man. But you know, yes,
got it, got to protect the white woman. And so this this accused murderer was dragged out of jail before his trial and hanged. Sheesh great after he wrote a song about After.
He wrote a song about it. Yeah, so he just so he front of Black grew with black people, learned our music, got roped into the racist folks, pretending like he ain't know nothing about it, gentrified John Henry. And then and he got somebody killed. Yeah wow, yeah, haven't heard that before.
No, so this initial country there is good and awesome country music. The first thing that called country music was wasn't by or for rural people. It was by and for urban white people who wanted nostalgia about the rural past that their parents or grandparents left behind, which is not inherently wrong. You can, I like, living in the country, I could imagine tabbing whatever, but just fucking own it.
Yeah, just be what you are. Yeah yeah, yeah. The romantization like and that's something even even in modern country music, Like that's something that I'm like, it's that doesn't bother me. The romantization of romanticization. I don't know how to say this, Like how you romanticize just like small town live urbans, it is what it is, Like, I mean hip hop does that with like hood and gang life, like like
this is clearly you're clearly romanticizing. Yeah, you know what I mean, because if you was here, Yeah, you like, there's there's certain things that you just like, I'm never reliving this again, you know what I mean. But but yeah, that but to know that like it was, and actually that's like to be like the first like recorded actual like star Yeah, was a poser. Yeah, is like also something that I mean that had happened today five two,
you know what I'm saying. The first like Megastar was like grand Master Caz wrote that, you.
Know anyway, Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
When the industry gets involved.
Yeah, totally, that is the Yeah, because that's the thing is, it's like he didn't invent that style of music or anything like that. I I don't know that he claimed to, you know, but yeah, he became the first star of at the first recorded and he managed to rip off both black culture and rural white working class culture all at once at that time and place skewed left wing, not right wing, which is not always the case and
not universal. True, that's part of my own I have to be careful about my own like romanticization of you know, the anyway whatever, So everyone wants a piece of John Henry as a symbol, including surprise entry into conversation. The Communist Party, Okay, credit where it's due. In the Great Depression, the Communist Party was probably the most influential political organization involved in black civil rights that had lots of black
leadership that was not specifically a black civil rights organization. Yeah, and the Communist Party started using John Henry as an icon of working class black America. I don't know whether this started with a white person or a black person in the Communist Party deciding this. I know that there was black leadership in the Communist Party, but it wasn't
a majority of it. I don't think this also represented the sort of masculinization of the left, because he was portrayed in this cartoonishly giant strong man way right, Yeah, this is around this time. It's my best guess, is when white socialists in the US move away from like humming opera and towards American folk music and blues and all this other stuff. One of the main people who drew John Henry for the Communist Party was a white Jewish New Yorker whose name I forgot to write down.
And the worst part is I actually literally wrote into the script a white Jewish New Yorker whose name I forgot to write down because I made that addition at the last minute, right before we recorded. And this particular man, yes, yeah, this synonymous man. No one knows who he is. Now the book I read knows who he is.
Yeah, plenty of people know. Yes, yes, I just didn't write it down.
Yeah, drew him cartoonishly large and powerful, like almost a superhero. This has two direct impacts. The less last lasting impact is that communist Jews were a understandably communist Jews were a huge part of the push against fascism in the nineteen thirties because they had plenty of their skin in that game multiple ways.
You know.
Yes, So when the US government was looking for icons for a multi racial American industrial power, like we're this multi racial industrial power, We're going to defeat Nazis, Right, there's John Henry. And so the images of the giant, strong industrial man, whether he's white or black, in US propaganda from this time comes from John Henry as a communist.
Wow. Okay.
When I was reading this book, like once I got to the part where like John Henry was dead, I was like, all right, Like, I mean, like I most have done with this story, right, he was dead, and I'm like, holy shit, holy shit.
What is happening. Yeah, guys buried the lead here, guys, I know. Yeah. Yeah.
The other lasting impact is that three Jewish leftist teenagers in New York City, Jerry Siegel, Joe Schuster and Jack Kirby or at least anti fascist, but coming from a leftist background, I believe they grew up seeing John Henry as this larger than life muscle icon fighting for what's right. So they grew up drawing comics. A lot of them are like John Henry and Space and Shit Right are
like the first comics. Eventually, his clothes get tighter, his skin gets lighter, and you get Superman and Captain America. Because that's the thing that these three kids make separately. The first two make Superman, the last one yeah, yeah, Captain America or by the way, someone fuck, someone's gonna be real mad at me, Bohoka.
Right, Hey guys, relax yea wherever you are relaxed, Yeah, this is relaxed.
I couldn't afford I tried to buy a number one as research, but iHeart was like, we were not going to do that.
Yeah, We're not going to spend a million dollars. Yeah.
Yeah. So many of the earliest superheroes that these folks drew were actually were darker skin too, though soon the industry stripped away both the politics and the melanin from it really quick because these first heroes were like tracking down capitalists who sent minors to their death.
Let's go, let's go.
Yeah. So a five foot one black convict laborer guy killed in an industrial accent accident is directly tied into the origins of blues, jazz, folk, country, and fucking comic books and is the model for Superman and Captain America.
Oh my gosh.
And then to go full circle, the last paragraph I have in my script, which is actually just ties into what you brought up. The very beginning. Black power activists in the early seventies taught John Henry to as an icon of a strong black man who died because he
worked for the white man, you know. And the use of him as a black power icon seems to have peaked in the seventies, but that's mostly because repression destroyed the black power movement in the seventies, and so he lives on as two separate things, a weird folk tale devoid of any political, cultural or racial analysis that's about like how we're better than machines but will die, and as a working class black Appalachian hero.
Wow, man, I need a minute. That's you just you just made my brain a pretzel? What a what a brain pretzel? You know, I know, oh you forget you know, like it's hard to say, like use words prop like ja. Yes, history is not it's not dominoes. It's not linear where this thing happened and then the air we call them eras like much later. But everything's happening just like it's happening now, Like just everything's happening at once all the time. Yea, you know, and of course because we're all on the
same planet, it is all interconnected. It's just the only way for you to be able to focus on what's happening is you have to take a piece by piece. But it's all it's all happening, you know. And but since we don't and I don't know, how could you, since we don't study history like that to where you're like, well, no, like this was what was all? It's all the time, you know what I mean, Like, yeah, that the integration, if you will, when someone ties it all together, it
it's so mind blowing. But it's also like, well, yeah, dumb, I mean I mean that's what was That's what people because yeah, that's what people do. That's how life is now, you know what I mean.
Like the ship you're doing can have that impact exactly.
You know, you got like all at the same time, Cali had a hurricane, Florida got a hurricane, while Russia and Ukraine are in war, while you know, Niche is being overthrown, while there's a fire in Johannesburg, while you know what I'm saying, so like yet yeah, while China is still outpacing us. Like all of it's happening in fifty cent through a mic at a lady. You know, like it's just it's all happening all right now, you know, so of course it's all connected.
Yeah, wow, Yeah, No, I there's this it's like meme going around where people are like everyone's afraid to go back in time because they're afraid if they change one small thing, it'll change everything about the future. But no one recognizes that that means that we can change the future. Like now, small things we do now could totally change everything about the future. Like like would we have superheroes
if John Henry hadn't been born. Probably, I don't know, you know, like yeah, but like we don't know, we don't know whether they would have looked the same. Everything about culture gets shaped by all of these things, these decisions that we make even if it's not you know, always conscious like I'm going to try and have the following effect. But yeah we can, fucking we can. Like gut shit done, we can't do and.
Shit, yes we can. It's so pop, Yes we can, Yes we can. Imagining a better future, dude, Margaret, I mean, I'm gonna go body roll to some blues hell.
Yeah, you know, gonna learn some pentatonic scales. That's what I gotta do.
Yeah, good luck, man, joints is difficult? What yeah? Yeah? And and then I don't know. I mean I feel like everybody does. You have these just like various like lucid memories or like you know, disparate images from childhood or books or things, maybe your parents that are passing or maybe you had to watch a video in school or something, and like, but they're bits and pieces of information. Yeah, and and so when you said so even we opened
when we opened it up, that's what happened. When you say you heard of John Henry, it was like at bits and pieces of it. That's why I was like, yeah, I know the story. And then I was like, wait, no, I don't wait, yeah.
I do, but you knew more of the story than I did.
Yeah, you know, so there there. Yeah, just those man, i I'm like as a just a fan of the show and just a fan of learning like you. Just like, man, you just connect again. The birds just all came into all came into place right now. Hell yeah, I'm I'm so thankful, like I feel gratitude.
Oh no, I like having you on this show.
This is good, man, keep doing this. We're gonna we're gonna renew We're renewing Margaret's contract. Yeah, we're renewing my contract.
As long as you guys want to do shows, there's a place for you.
The heat Death of the Universe.
So the heat Death of the Universe.
Or are we breathing too much silica dust?
You know, one of those things.
Yeah. Well, if people want to hear your podcast, please hood Politics. What's your podcast podcast called?
Yeah? Uh? Politics with Prop? Yeah, so the Politics with Prop. Matt and I are actually sitting on seven songs that we're gonna, you know, kind of put out as a mix tape do like some song exploders. But we're waiting for He's fools to figure out how to do the cooler zone on Android, you know what I mean. So we're kind of waiting on that. That's ready.
So it's gonna be a Cooler Zone mixtape. Yeah cool, I mean, I mean.
Cooler. Are we gonna make that? Are we gonna make that a thing that's cool?
Get us an actual cooler as the logo.
Yo, I'm gonna trying. I'm gonna try to get my trying to get my kids to say start saying cooler. It's cooler man. Yeah yeah, dad can't do it. I think we're too old to start slag. Yeah yeah, yeah, I'm sorry, I can't start slaying. I'm like, but your dad's a wrapper.
Yeah yeah, but you do like old man, your dad? Yeah you rap about dad shit? Yeah yeah. Now terrorform cold brew please use promo code hood get fifteen percent off. When we did this on the.
I threw that out on it could happen here and sold war coffee did ibbly like y'all got a lot of listeners. I like this, Yeah yeah so so yeah yeah, do that and follow me on all the things prop hip hop.
Hell yam. And if you are white person concerned about what is cultural appreciation and not, one thing that is almost always safe to do is buy things from black owned businesses.
Listen, you can't lose. Yeah, I will take your money, yeah and appropriate it. Well, I will allocate the funds.
Yes, if you want to watch me at the end of every single episode not remember what it is that I'm going to.
I swear.
I was like, I spent the whole break in between being like, I'm gonna remember the thing that I'm supposed to plug and I don't know what it is.
Is it a live show? Do you have like I don't coming up?
I think so, No, I.
But I have. Are you running for office?
I've been thinking about it, but no, I probably won't. It gets distracted. Think you know what that would look like? Vote Margaret anarchist for president?
Amazing?
Well, okay, it's all about music. I have a bunch of different music projects. This isn't what I was going to pitch, but or promote or whatever. Plug that's the verb.
My most recent whatever. My most recent is of a synthpop band called the Lathe and it is a We have an EP out on band camp and Spotify, and as Prop pointed out, even if Spotify pays garbage, people look at the Spotify numbers in order to determine how important someone is, whereas no one looks at band camp to say how important is this band because it doesn't have an immediate quantifiable number. So, however you choose to listen to it, I'm perfectly happy. I hope you enjoy it.
I'm also in a black metal band called Feminine School, and I am not yet in a band with Sophie m be good thing.
Oh oh man, it broke up. Would you say you're not in a band with what Sophie me? Yeah? Did you imagine.
Ruined Margaret's career?
Talent?
Is that? Is that your achilles heel? Is that the one thing you can't do?
Oh? No, I got, I got Midian auto tune. We're fine. I'm just gonna you just sing.
Look, I don't know what I need to do to be in these like group texts or like party situations, because I feel like I can't wait, like we have yet to like party somewhere, like yeah, you know, and like I need to see y'all on it.
I'm on the West Coast.
DJ Daniel just remixed my voice onto the I've been asking for a cool Zone Media ending jingle since we decided we were going to do Cool Zone Media, and they just finalize that, so maybe I could be in a band.
All right, Well, well that sounds dope to me.
Is your plug that everyone should go listen to your band?
No, my plug is that everyone should go listen to your band and go listen to Prop's new album.
Yeah, all right, bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.