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 "Ashville 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). 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 spike driver, John Henry; and even when they do not, writes folklorist Kip Lornell, "one feels his strong and valorous presence in the song".

For almost a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, convicts, mostly African American, were leased to work as forced labor in the mines, railroad camps, brickyards, turpentine farms, and then on road gangs of the American South. Forced labor on chain gangs, levees, and huge, plantation-like prison farms continued well into the twentieth century. It was not unusual for work songs like "Take this Hammer" and its "floating verses" to drift between occupations along with the itinerant laborers who sang them. The elements of both the ballad of "John Henry" and the "Take This Hammer" complex appear to date from the late nineteenth century, probably the 1870s.

A manuscript variant of "Take This Hammer" from 1915 was published by the folklorist and English professor Newman Ivey White:

This old hammer killed John Henry,
But it can't kill me.
Take this hammer, take it to the Captain,
Tell him I'm gone, babe, tell him I'm gone.

In the 1920s, folklorists, notably Dorothy Scarborough (1925) and Guy Johnson and Howard W. Odum (1926), also collected transcribed versions. Scarborough's short text, published in her book, On The Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925), is the first version published under the title "Nine-Pound Hammer", before the earliest commercial recording of that name. This was the white "hillbilly" (as country music was then called) 78 single by Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters. Hopkins's "Nine Pound Hammer" added the chorus "Roll on buddy / Don't you roll so slow. / How can I roll / When the wheels won't go?" This was the first of many hillbilly recordings of the song, including, notably (The Monroe Brothers' "Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy", in 1936.) Carl Sandburg's popular anthology, The American Songbag (1927) contains the song "My Old Hammah" ("Shine like silver"). In 1928, before the Depression put an end to his recording career, African-American blues singer Mississippi John Hurt issued a commercial single, "Spike Driver Blues" on Okeh records. This song, with intricate finger-picked guitar accompaniment, combines some elements of the "John Henry" ballad. It was later included in Harry Smith's celebrated 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music LP set, leading to the rediscovery of the performer. Norm Cohen terms "Spike Driver Blues" "a lyrical variant of "Nine-Pound Hammer" and "more an entertainment piece than an actual work song, but their close kinship is unmistakable".

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