The John Henry Story

Destination Freedom. Destination Freedom, dramatization of the great democratic traditions of the Negro people, is brought to you by Station WMAQ as a part of the pageant of history and of America's own destination freedom. Among America's folk heroes whose legends multiply as they are handed down from generation to generation, few occupy more of the minstrel's time than the legend of John Henry.

In the second and final section of our folk tales, Destination Freedom recounts the John Henry story. This big hard times came over the land. Nobody had no words. The sun took a moon by right the hand.

Said, Lord, let's make a new kind of man. Lord, let's make a new man. They said it all started one year when the hard times came down over the state of Louisiana. And it must have been contagious, because it caught on everywhere, they say.

The whole economy stopped and went to sleep. And everywhere you looked, nothing was happening. The cotton was rotten on the ground, and folks were going round half-close. Crops when the fields but nobody could reap would have been sowed.

The trains had stopped running because the tracks had disappeared and everybody was raving around, just waiting for Merkel to get the economy going again. Well, that's when the sun and the moon got together. That's when John Henry was born.

John Henry! The job took nine days. The earth trembled like a leaf. All the rivers stopped running, and the lightning struck the earth again. The split had happened too like an apple. And the moon came down and sat on the right side of the split, and the sun came down and sat on the left side.