"John Henry" is an African American folk hero. He is said to have worked as a "steel-driving man" — a man tasked with hammering a steel drill into rock to make holes for explosives to blast the rock in constructing a railroad tunnel. According to legend, John Henry's prowess as a steel-driver was measured in a race against a steam-powered hammer, a race that he won only to die in victory with hammer in hand as his heart gave out from stress. Guy B. Johnson, a Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina, investigated the legend of John Henry in the late 1920s. He concluded that John Henry was a real person who worked on and died at the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway's (C&O Railway) Big Bend Tunnel. The tunnel was built near Talcott, West Virginia, from 1870 to 1872 (according to Johnson's dating) and named for the big bend in the Greenbrier River nearby. Some versions of the song refer to the location of John Henry's death as "The Big Bend Tunnel on the C. & O. Road". Johnson visited the area around 1929 and found several men who said that they were boys of 12 or 14 when the tunnel was begun and that they could remember seeing John Henry, a large, powerful man. Although most of these men had heard of but not seen the famous contest between John Henry and the steam drill, Johnson ultimately was able to find a man who said he had seen it. It has been printed (with various melodies) in Alan Lomax's The Folk Songs of North America and in Pete Seeger's American Favorite Ballads. It is in The Anthology of American Folk Music. It has also been recorded by Burl Ives, Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash, Furry Lewis, Big Bill Broonzy, Fiddlin' John Carson, Uncle Dave Macon, Leon Bibb, Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Bruce Springsteen, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Merle Travis, Harry Belafonte, Mississippi John Hurt (as "Spike Driver Blues"), Michael Cooney and others. The tune shown here is approximately the tune sung by Michael Cooney with bottle-neck guitar on his The Cheese Stands Alone album.