Our Singing Country

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	Our Singing Country
	8 Roosevelt's in the White House, drinkin5 out of a silver cup, McKinley's in the graveyard, never waked up,. He's gone a long old time.
	JOHN HENRY A^. No. 2668. Arthur Bell, Cummins State Farm, Pine Bluff, Ark., 1939. See Guy B. John­son, John Henry; Louis W. Chappell, John Henry, Any general collection of American folk songs that does not include the ballad of John Henry, the Negro steel-drivin' man, would not seem to us in any wise complete. This almost epic ballad of the industrial revolution with its lights and shadows from the tunnel workings of the West Virginia hills, its burly and laughing defiance of the earth and the machine and of death, is probably America's greatest single piece of folk lore. Although, therefore, the earlier volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs contains a long composite version, we print here nine stanzas and a tune recorded near Pine Bluff, Arkansas. It is a western version in which John Henry is pictured as the Louisiana section-gang worker. We have found no exact parallel to this stirring air among the thirty or forty versions in the Library of Congress Folk Song Archive. *                                       *                                       5JC aI can tell you all about double-jinted people. You couldnH let them be prize fighters because any double-jinted man could knock you out. A double-jinted man, he}s got two jints to your one] heys always fat and stout and everything, and he can just tear you up just like that, you understand. C(I knowed old man Eph Brown, which my father showed him to me when I was"a little small boy. We was down in the gin house where they was ginning cotton into bales that weighed 550 and 575 pound. Well, it take four or five men to put a bale on a wagon, but old man Eph Brown just go there and, y cause he was double-jinted, just picks up the bale of cotton, chunk it in the wagon, git in the wagon and go ahead on home. "Nowadays mighty few men you find HI be double-jinted. Once I was a boy} I was about sixteen years old and we was carryiny corn to the mill down South. Pd always been a good knocker. I could knock with my fists, and I run up on a boy, he was double-jinted. Boys round in them times, you know, was always round talking ybout one another's knocking, and all the boys [258]