Interview with Scott Reynolds Nelson | Sound Authors Radio

January 9, 2009

Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors! My next guest on the show is Scott Reynolds Nelson and he’s a multi-award winning author and this latest book is called Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, The Untold Story of an American Legend. I have a secret obsession with this legend. I love all the versions of this song that have come out through the years. From the really early records to some of the more recent releases by people like Doc Watson. What a story of this fellow and what a legend that surrounds him. Welcome to the show Scott Nelson.

Scott Nelson: Thanks so much for having me Kent.

Dr. Kent: Now tell me of course if folks know some old time music or even if they don’t they’ve heard that there exists this legend of John Henry, but your book talks about the actual fellow. So tell us about the legends and the person John Henry.

Scott Nelson: Right; John Henry was a man who died with a hammer in his hand. The legend is that John Henry challenged a machine to a race and the two of them running side by side go inside of a tunnel and at the end of the day John Henry wins but dies at the end. Its one of the most popular American folk songs; over 200 recorded versions of the song and I had initially got interested in John Henry because I had written about railroad workers in a previous book. I kind of thought of him as a legend but came across the guy who I think is the real person.

Dr. Kent: He’s a fascinating character because he’s also been immortalized as this not only person that I guess wins against a machine which metaphorically is so powerful but also a black man that won against the machine. Talk about the significance politically of this.

Scott Nelson: It’s interesting; one of the most popular country songs, one of the very first recorded songs in country music is the song about the sort of tragedy of the death of a black man, a powerful black man at that. It was not you at the time in the 1880s, 90, and the turn of the century and its really the kind of worst of the worst for African Americans in the south and here you have a song that people are singing to each other about this terrible, terrible death.

Dr. Kent: Now this guy really did beat the machine, is that the story?

Scott Nelson: That’s the story, its as I kind of worked deeper into the problem, it was pretty clear that in 1870 and 71 or 72 when the railroads were being built on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad the C&O Road in the song, that a steam rail was something that you and I could’ve beaten. It was something that was powered pneumatically and wasn’t electrically powered so the ten horse power engine was relatively weak, it was constantly breaking down. The dust that was generated would cause it to break down constantly and so I found these records that show the steam rails that were brought out onto the site just wouldn’t work, couldn’t work. John Henry could beat them but John Henry it turns out was a convict. He’s a black man who along with 200 other men it turned out were sent to this rail line to work.

Dr. Kent: Wow. What a story. How did you decide to do this? Were you inspired by the song? And you said that you’d worked on a railroad book. Was it because of how railroad men honor this character?

Scott Nelson: Yeah, that was my interest in it. I had written a book called Iron Confederacy about the construction of the southern railway and all the black and white men, but mostly black men who built the southern railway. So I was interested in sort of how they memorialized him and how they thought about him and what it said about them. Not so much about the person named John Henry but as I kind of thought more about the song and started to piece it together I discovered a lot of the things that I did know about the construction of the C&O really dovetailed with the facts of that construction. As I moved further into it, it’s got a dark cavity and first they tried to get Chinese workers, then Irish workers, then the black workers to do this tunneling and none of them would do it. Potter Huntington finally brought in convicts to do the final construction to do the building in these tunnels. The side by side with these rails, they died by the hundreds. Over 200 died in the space of three years.

Dr. Kent: 200 died?

Scott Nelson: Yeah, there are about, its chilling, about 10% a year died and in the space of three or four years, the 10% of those who were brought up from the penitentiary and then three and four years after that the remainder died. Most of them from what was called consumption, which I think is like silicosis, from all the dust in your lungs and it kills you. So like these other folks, he died. What sort of led me to it was the last line of the song. “They took John Henry to the lighthouse and buried him in the sand. Every locomotive over ### the Steel Drivin’ Man.” As I was listening to that lyric I remembered that there’s a lighthouse at the Virginia Penitentiary and that in 1992 they found 200 skeletons of men that were buried from 1868 to 1872. They couldn’t figure out where they had come from, but based on the Virginia Penitentiary records it was clear that they had been working on these tunnels and then dragged back to Richmond where they were either dying or dead.

Dr. Kent: Huh! Talking about this character John Henry, why is it that people are still so passionate about it? I mean it’s a fascinating book, a fascinating story, and then of course on the front cover there’s this great enormous man hammering in a stake. What does that mean?

Scott Nelson: Right; an anatomically impossible man with muscles on his shoulders bigger than his legs but yeah, its kind of I think that initially the song was transmitted and related to kind of the dirge of the kind of song about a terrible tragedy in the construction of these tunnels. You hear in the very early versions of the song its sung very slowly, sung by workers to get them to slow down, but over time as steam got rode in; as the story passes on, beating a steam loco no longer seems like a tragic story, it seems like an impossible story. It was like John Henry gets stronger and stronger as track liners bring the song to many other places in the south; to Richmond, to the mountains in West Virginia and so he becomes a symbol for lots of different people. And for people that work in cotton mills, the idea of working side by side right next to the machine that’s going to kill you is very familiar. People that were dying of brown lung were working in textile mills. For miners, they know that life is short and all this machinery that’s being brought in to the mine is dangerous. Even for the folks who are fans of folk music, who with just the electric guitar, this is likewise a symbol of this sort of battle against the machine that lots of folks are facing. So it becomes a symbol of this battle against the machine but he also becomes impossibly powerful as the machines themselves become impossibly powerful.

Dr. Kent: Right and this John Henry story was picked up in the late 50s and 60s by the folk movement as very powerful also and that actually nicely dovetails nicely with what you said about anti-electric instruments; that movement.

Scott Nelson: Right, and even the communist party also becomes fascinated by John Henry because they see him as a character who; in the 1920s, folks in the communist countries were angry about what was going on in the south, see the story of John Henry as emblematic of the gen-pro system of the convict-re system and so many of the images that we have in the early 1930s by communist artists in magazines like the Labor Press and things like that are about the power of labor. It basically represented the battle between capitalism and labor that Mark’s talking about. They see the John Henry song as a direct demonstration of that conflict.

Dr. Kent: And it’s really timely right now again, honestly.

Scott Nelson: Right; in some sense the song of John Henry initially as it was passed along among these track liners, it’s a song about not working too hard because it can kill you and certainly even today its worth recalling that we constantly speed up our lives at danger to ourselves.

Dr. Kent: Let me ask you; you’re a professor of history at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Do you mention this stuff to your students? Do they enjoy talking about John Henry?

Scott Nelson: I do and its funny the sort of variety of responses. They’ve kind of gotten used to my bizarre antics and stories about railroads and the legalese in the late 19th century but yeah, in fact it was in the classroom that my writing of the book sort of began and it was really trying to tell the story in a way that made sense to the students who are only 18 to 21 that have to really sink into the book and think of it as an extended story and not just a standard historical fact.

Dr. Kent: Telling the story in that way made you get some prizes; tell us about that.

Scott Nelson: It did! When I was writing the book I had in mind, I sort of broke a bunch of rules. My first book was very traditional. The second book I was composing in my head the nasty reviews that this thing would get from the American Journal Institute. “This joke, speaking in the first person was calling all these crazy little anecdotes, dragging all these anecdotes into the story and not telling a story with a traditional argument…” I was rehearsing in my mind all these nasty things historians were going to say about the book and surprisingly that didn’t happen. Kind of the opposite happened, the goofy little stories and the footnotes in the back you can use to follow the sources so it’s perfectly easy to find its history. I just got the aw-shucks tone of the book and the story-tone tone of the book would make people pretty angry but oddly it had kind of the opposite effect.

Dr. Kent: It is a fantastic book because of the “aww shucks” tone and it feels like you’re inside the story when you read the book. Here’s another question for you. The book has kind of been made into a children’s book Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man. Talk about that.

Scott Nelson: Well as we were finishing the book we talked to Mark Aaronson who does mostly children’s books and he thought that it would be interesting to kids and one of the things we sort of decided as we put the kids book together is that the cool thing about research, about being a historian is you get to look into primary sources on your own. You get to read other peoples’ letters; you get to kind of comb through all of these documents and assemble a story of your own. You have to use the media, the encyclopedia, books and articles and things like that but the chaos and the really cool thing about this is working with primary sources and we don’t really get most undergraduate students don’t get that chance. You don’t get it in high school. You kind of get it in graduate school and so I thought, we both thought, that it would be great to get nine to twelve year olds to use those primary resources themselves. Anybody can go into a library and look at manuscripts. You have to get a library card, you have to be careful with those things, but that’s kind of the exciting part of doing your research is its something that really anybody at about the age of nine or ten can start to do. So the book is really a how to book; how historians work, how we move around the records, how we try to put stories together from the documents that we have.

Dr. Kent: And it is great. What a great profession that is!

Scott Nelson: Thanks, I pinch myself in the mornings sometimes to think that this is job!

Dr. Kent: To get awards for doing such fun stuff right?

Scott Nelson: Right, exactly.

Dr. Kent: It’s been a real honor speaking with Scott Reynolds Nelson about his great book about John Henry and his kid’s book Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man. His book about John Henry has won some amazing awards and I wish you all the best. Where can we find these books?

Scott Nelson: Amazon.com or in your local Barnes & Noble. Steel Drivin’ Man just came out in paperback recently and it’s kind of all over. Ain’t Nothin’ but a Man will also be in Barnes & Noble and Borders and also at Amazon.

Dr. Kent: Great presents for little kids thinking about being researchers when they grow up and for the musicophiles and people who love stories for the Steel Drivin’ Man. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Scott Nelson: Thanks so much, great talking to you.

Dr. Kent: All right, my next guest on the show will be the award winning New York Times Bestselling author Katherine Neville with her novel that’s coming out soon called The Fire. Of course her book The Aids got tons of critical acclaim and we’ll talk to her after this short break. Come on back for that.

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