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Is John Henry a real person?
What is the story of John Henry?
Was John Henry a folk hero?
Who is John Henry?
An amazing story of the human spirit and work ethic, yes, but was John Henry a real person? Most historians agree that he was, as thousands of African-Americans worked on the railroad, with hundreds perishing during the drilling of the Great Bend Tunnel .
Folklorists have long thought John Henry to be mythical, but historian Scott Nelson has discovered that he was a real person—a nineteen-year-old from New Jersey who was convicted of theft in a Virginia court in 1866, sentenced to ten years in the penitentiary, and put to work building the C&O Railroad.
John Henry the Revelator by Constantine von Hoffman is a magical realist novel, in which a teenage boy in 1930s Alabama, Moses Crawford, acquires superpowers and helps challenge the nation's white power structure. The black community calls Crawford John Henry, after the folk hero, because no one is aware of his true identity.
- 1840s or 1850s
- American folk hero
In the Alabama story, John Henry was John Henry Dabney, an ex-slave from Copiah County, Mississippi, who followed Captain Frederick Yeamans Dabney to Dunnavant, Alabama, to bore tunnels through...
- John Garst
Jul 24, 2018 · Kristina Gaddy 24 July 2018. Outside the Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, West Virginia, stands a statue of a powerfully built man holding a hammer in his hands. It pays tribute to John Henry, the American folk hero whose larger-than-life feats inspired the popular song, “The Ballad of John Henry.”. According to legend, Henry was an African ...
Feb 28, 2006 · 2-28-06. John Henry real? Truth or tall tale, the John Henry story has been told for more than a hundred years. Many historians believe it is based, in part, on a real person and event...
Mar 7, 2024 · Although there were songs about John Henry, there were few stories of him, and, like Paul Bunyan, he is not truly a folk hero. The imaginative treatment by Roark Bradford in John Henry (1931) made the name known to many Americans. John Henry has been depicted in numerous works of art and has inspired film and television plots, but the story ...