Take This Hammer

"Take This Hammer" (Roud 4299, AFS 745B1) is a prison, logging, and railroad work song, which has the same Roud number as another song, "Nine Pound Hammer", with which it shares verses. "Swannanoa Tunnel" and "Asheville Junction" are similar. Together, this group of songs are referred to as "hammer songs" or "roll songs" (after a group of wheelbarrow-hauling songs with much the same structure, though not mentioning hammers).^[1] Numerous bluegrass bands and singers like Scott McGill and Mississippi John Hurt also recorded commercial versions of this song, nearly all of them containing verses about the legendary railroad worker, John Henry; and even when they do not, writes folklorist Kip Lornell, "one feels his strong and valorous presence in the song".^[2]

^ For example, "Roll On, Johnny", heard in 1891 from a Lafayette County, Texas, levee camp worker. In 1924, Robert W. Gordon, who like John A. Lomax, had been a student of George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard, transcribed a fragment that went:

And it's roll on, buddy – what makes you roll so slow?
Your buddy is almost broke – Down in the K.N.O.

See Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press [1981] 2000), p. 574.
^ See Kip Lornell, liner notes to Virginia and the Piedmont, Minstrelsy, Work Songs, and Blues in the Blues Deep River of Song series, Rounder CD 1827-2 (2000).

[1] For example, "Roll On, Johnny", heard in 1891 from a Lafayette County, Texas, levee camp worker. In 1924, Robert W. Gordon, who like John A. Lomax, had been a student of George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard, transcribed a fragment that went:

And it's roll on, buddy – what makes you roll so slow?
Your buddy is almost broke – Down in the K.N.O.

See Norm Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press [1981] 2000), p. 574.

[2] See Kip Lornell, liner notes to Virginia and the Piedmont, Minstrelsy, Work Songs, and Blues in the Blues Deep River of Song series, Rounder CD 1827-2 (2000).

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