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Summary
Summary
Who was the real John Henry? The story of this legendary African-American figure has come down to us in so many songs, stories, and plays, that the facts are often lost. Historian Scott Nelson brings John Henry alive for young readers in his personal quest for the true story of the man behind the myth. Nelson presents the famous folk song as a mystery to be unraveled, identifying the embedded clues within the lyrics, which he examines to uncover many surprising truths. He investigates the legend and reveals the real John Henry in this beautifully illustrated book.
Nelson's narrative is multilayered, interweaving the story of the building of the railroads, the period of Reconstruction, folk tales, American mythology, and an exploration of the tradition of work songs and their evolution into blues and rock and roll. This is also the story of the author's search for the flesh-and-blood man who became an American folk hero; Nelson gives a first-person account of how the historian works, showing history as a process of discovery. Readers rediscover an African-American folk hero. We meet John Henry, the man who worked for the railroad, driving steel spikes. When the railroad threatens to replace workers with a steam-powered hammer, John Henry bets that he can drive the beams into the ground faster than the machine. He wins the contest, but dies in the effort.
Nelson's vibrant text, combined with archival images, brings a new perspective and focus to the life and times of this American legend.
Author Notes
Author and historian Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Legum Professor of History at The College of William and Mary in Virginia. His previous book on John Henry, Steel Drivin' Man, was awarded the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Prize and an Anisfield-Wolf award. He lives in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nelson (Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend) offers a highly accessible version of his research into whether or not the John Henry of folksong fame was a real person. Piecing together a panoply of facts and personal anecdotes that go back to his boyhood, the author models the study of history as an active and passionate pursuit: "For years I had been following a trail, and it was stone cold.... And then... I suddenly saw it, the clue that changed everything." This cliffhanger at the end of the first chapter draws readers into Nelson's journey through the song lyrics, old prison documents, maps, photographs and other primary and secondary sources. From "trackliners" (workers, often African-American, who aligned rails) to steam drills to Civil War history, the first-person narrative follows Nelson as he plays detective. Seemingly diverse information presented in each of nine chapters becomes knit together by the conclusion, and visually unified by an aesthetically pleasingly layout that features a reddish brick palette with tinted photos and prints. One graphic--and telling--photo reveals the remains of two African-African men discovered on the grounds of a Virginia prison: John Henry, posits the author, was part of a huge prisoner work force hired out to tunnel through mountains for the railroad companies. Convincing and dramatic, this volume makes a good case that history is a living science. Ages 10-14. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Horn Book Review
(Intermediate) The author of an award-winning adult book on John Henry joins with a notable writer of young adult nonfiction to lead readers through a search illuminating the mystery of history. Though sometimes temporarily stymied, Nelson follows clues, from song lyrics to census data, engineering reports, and prison records, tracking a folk hero who originated in the reality of 1870s racial injustice. Sepia historical photographs on buff paper, with scarlet captions and occasional overlays, depict the setting and cast for this gripping saga. We learn the likelihood that John Henry was a convict who might have died from a heart attack after his famous duel with a steam engine but more probably succumbed to the rock-dust-induced lung disease silicosis, after which he was secretly buried along with hundreds of other incarcerated African Americans hired out for railroad work. Given the dramatic role that photographs play in identifying the "white house" of the song (Nelson believes it was a reference to the Virginia Penitentiary), it is curious that there is no description of the process by which he discovered what may be an actual photograph of John Henry, but Nelson's archival sleuthing is otherwise meticulously documented. Appendices add background and suggest research guidelines, while a bibliography, source notes, and index support further investigation. From HORN BOOK, (c) Copyright 2010. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Not many history books are written in first person, but this is no ordinary history book. It traces a historian's quest for the man behind the legend of John Henry. Nelson's research involved listening to hundreds of variants of the song John Henry, learning about post-Civil War railway construction projects, visiting possible sites for the legendary contest between man and steam drill, and in one groundbreaking moment, glancing at the 1910 postcard on his desktop, hearing the lyrics of a version of John Henry in his mind, and making a connection that no other modern historian had considered. Based on Nelson's Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend (2006), this large-format volume retells the story for young people. Many period photos, paintings, and engravings, reproduced in shades of rust and sepia, are shown to good advantage in this handsomely designed book. Appendixes include suggestions for further reading and Nelson's notes on his sources and on the John Henry song variants, as well as the ongoing search for information about John Henry. Marc Aronson contributes a section on How to Be a Historian, using Nelson's search as a model. A lively, insightful introduction to the active pursuit of history.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
State Penitentiary, Richmond, Va. IT seems odd to worry that a review will give away the ending of a history book, but Scott Reynolds Nelson's account of his search for the real John Henry, the steel-drivin' man of so much song and story, poses just that problem. "Ain't Nothing but a Man" is the tale of a detective chasing the ultimate cold case - a missing person who may or may not be fictional - and it's so engaging, so full of the thrill of the hunt, that it feels mean to dampen the book's pleasures even a little by telling you right away what, or rather who, Nelson found. So I won't tell, exactly, but I can give you a taste of what's inside. This book is a children's version of "Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry : The Untold Story of an American Legend," Nelson's prizewinning 2006 book for grown-ups. The story begins at a dead end, in October 1998, when Nelson, a history professor at the College of William and Mary, was contemplating a huge pile of research about 19th-century railroad workers and listening to so many versions of "John Henry" that his family was getting annoyed. "It was as if John Henry were driving steel in our own home," he writes. But none of his puzzle pieces fit. He stared at his computer screen, not knowing where to go next. The world still rings with the ballad of John Henry, who raced against a steam drill and died with a hammer in his hand. Search his name in iTunes and you will find well over 100 versions of the song, by artists from Bruce Springsteen to Snuffy Jenkins to the Limeliters. He clearly belongs in that small circle of everlasting American folk heroes, but unlike Paul Bunyan with his blue ox, or Pecos Bill riding a cyclone, John Henry has always had an aura of literal truth around him. Some versions of the song have John Henry working on a real railroad, the C&O - or Covington & Ohio, later called the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway. The C&O connected eastern Virginia to the Ohio River in the early 1870s, tunneling through the Allegheny Mountains, and the tunnels had been dug with the help of steam drills and men with hammers. Some verses of the song even mention a real tunnel as the site of the deadly race: "The Big Bend Tunnel on the C and O Road," which still exists in West Virginia, near a town with a statue of John Henry. Nelson goes there himself and realizes that this version can't be right. The tunnel's red shale is too soft to have required a steam drill to dig through, and the remnants of passages drilled down through the mountaintop to provide air and an exit for debris are too narrow to have accommodated such machinery. "I was sure that John Henry did not die here," Nelson writes. "But I had no idea where to look next." Nelson pursues his man by trying to construct, or reconstruct, a straight rail line of facts to his destination, but is always having to replace missing ties with logical leaps and educated guesses, and the route keeps veering in unexpected directions. He stumbles on some vital clues in a set of letters archived by mistake: they are not the writings of Henry Grady the well-known Southern journalist, but the barely readable notes, written in purple crayon, of Henry Grady the unknown railroad carpenter. They paint a blurry picture of the strenuous, dangerous life of trackliners, as the laborers assigned to fixing and maintaining the rails were known. And he finds the most important clue of all practically staring him in the face: a detail in an old photograph that he uses as his computer Screensaver. Nelson keeps the momentum going even as he keeps piling on pieces of railroad, musical and historical lore. As we steadily close in on his prime candidate for the man behind the legend, we learn about the history of work songs and the steam-plus-dynamite technology that allowed men to "march through any mountain like a hungry animal devouring meat." Since the story is set during and just after the Civil War, it dwells on issues of race and suffering; Nelson sheds light on the forgotten lives of the 40,000 African-Americans who laid track throughout the South, and the brutal fates of prisoners forced into cheap labor for the railroads. The challenge of making history come alive for children, little creatures with no histories of their own, is too often achieved through contortions of hipness or overdramatization. Congratulations to Nelson and Marc Aronson (who has written prizewinning books of nonfiction for children) for giving us history straight up, even with appendices and an index, and explaining the real work of the researcher. It involves slogging through library catalogs, hounding librarians and working toward that awesome moment when, after years of fruitless searching, a document emerges from a long-sealed box covered in coal dust that covers your arms and cheeks and stings your eyes. Not since that scene in "All the President's Men," with Woodward and Bernstein sifting through mountains of checkout slips in the Library of Congress, has the tedium of a paper chase been made to seem so cool. "Ain't Nothing but a Man" is generously supplemented with old illustrations and photographs, even one taken through the windshield of the author's car as he approaches the tunnel he thinks could be John Henry's. The book doesn't say an awful lot about the song itself in its many incarnations - that gets an extended exploration in the grown-up book, but not here - and sometimes takes leaps that seem a little bigger than necessary. Were pictures of John Henry's ripped torso really the inspiration for Superman? And even if a railroad worker did "rock and roll" a drill between whacks of a hammer, did that term really have anything to do with the one that, many decades later, came to mean something a lot less dangerous and a lot more fun? But never mind that. Nelson's enthusiasm for historical sleuthing would whet any reader's appetite to do the same. It pulls the neat trick of giving you a heaping serving of a story you thought you already knew, and leaving you wanting more. Lawrence Dowries is an editorial writer for The Times.
School Library Journal Review
Gr 4-8-This book is as much about a historian's quest for the truth as it is a biography of the well-known strong man. Nelson chronicles how he began to learn about African-American workers on the railroad in the South. He talks about his research process and delineates primary and secondary sources. Noting how dead ends occur during research, the author explains how he overcame roadblocks and took his search in other directions. The layout is attractive, with a sepia and beige background for the text and sepia-toned photographs to set the atmosphere for this history taking place during the Civil War years. The appendixes explain the many versions of the folk song and include a section about "How to Be a Historian" by Marc Aronson. This is an excellent example of how much detective work is needed for original research. It will fill a need in many collections.-Blair Christolon, Prince William Public Library System, Manassas, VA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
With assistance from Aronson, a veteran author/editor and nabob of nonfiction, Nelson recasts his adult title Steel Drivin' Man: The Untold Story of an American Legend (2006) into a briefer account that not only suspensefully retraces his search for the man behind the ballad, but also serves as a useful introduction to historical-research methods. Supported by a generous array of late-19th- and early-20th-century photos--mostly of chain-gang "trackliners" and other rail workers--the narrative pieces together clues from song lyrics, an old postcard, scattered business records and other sources, arriving finally at both a photo that just might be the man himself, and strong evidence of the drilling contest's actual location. The author then goes on to make speculative but intriguing links between the trackliners' work and the origins of the blues and rock-'n'-roll, and Aronson himself closes with an analytical appendix. It's an eye-opening case study in how history and folklore can intertwine. (maps, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 10-13) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.