Leadbelly : Take This Hammer

Shackled under the blazing sun
           Old man John Henry still lives on
                                    Oh tell me should I stay
                                                     I ought to run away
Run Away to the melody of the workman’s song!


I chose to use Leadbelly's song - Take this Hammer, for my post this week as I felt that it was perhaps the perfect song to describe him. A man who, filled with defiance and pride was able to escape the life of a convict through his music. In essence, "he gave back the hammer to the captain" and acquired his freedom.

This song appears to be a work song, its catching rhythm and its reference to prison work such as mining suggest that is can be sung to pass the time. This song, similar to Mississippi John Hurts' song, Spike Driver Blues, references the American folk hero John Henry, who was said to have been extremely strong and worked as a steel driving man.

The themes of slavery are heavy in this song as it is with most African American folk music. Initially I considered doing a drawing showing an enslaved black man working, to try and get the ideas of the song across. However, I reevaluated that, thinking the meaning of the song to be more complicated than that. I then thought of a more interesting way to express this same imagery and the themes of the song better. I decided to do this through a literary device, the Limerick. This is a type of poem that has five lines and follows the rhyming pattern of AABBA.


Shackled under the blazing sun
          Old man John Henry still lives on
                                    Oh tell me should I stay
                                                     I ought to run away
Run away to the melody of the workman’s song!

It took quite a while to arrange just five lines that I thought were a good response to not only the song but Leadbelly's life and escape to music. I choose to write it in the first person as if these were Leadbelly's words and I also chose to stagger the lines of the poem, a visual representation of this idea of progression that occurred in Leadbelly life, not just from enslavement to freedom but from being a criminal to a great historical figure in African American history and American folk music. I  chose to align the first and last line to reference the idea that even though he left his enslavement he would return to prison and the idea of progression and escape would become relevant again.