Take This Hammer
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American
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Transcription: by Darryl D. Bush
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Lyrics:
Take dis hammer, carry it to the captain. (3x)
Tell him I'm gone,
Tell him I'm gone.
If he asks you was I runnin', (3x)
Tell him I was flyin',
Tell him I was flyin'.
If he asks you was I laughin', (3x)
Tell him I was cryin',
Tell him I was cryin'.
They wanna feed me cornbread and molasses, (3x)
But I got my pride,
Well, I got my pride.
Cap'n called me "a nappy headed devil", (3x)
That ain't my name,
That ain't my name.
Cap'n got a big gun and he try to play bad, (3x)
Goin' take it in the mornin'
If he makes me mad.
I'm goin' these few days I started, (3x)
Then I'm goin' home,
Then I'm goin' home.
"Take This Hammer" is a prison, logging, and railroad work song, which has the same Roud<br> number as "Nine Pound Hammer", with which it shares verses. "Swannanoa Tunnel" is similar.<br> For almost a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, convicts, mostly African American,<br> were leased to work as forced labor in the mines, railroad camps, brickyards, turpentine<br> farms and then on road gangs of the South. Forced labor on chain gangs, levees and huge,<br> plantation-like prison farms continued well into the twentieth century. It was not unusual<br> for work songs like "Take this Hammer" and its "floating verses" to drift between occupations<br> along with the itinerant laborers who sang them. The elements of both the ballad <br> "John Henry" and the "Take This Hammer" complex appear to date from the late nineteenth<br> century, probably the 1870s.<br> It was printed in John and Alan Lomax's Best Loved American Folk Songs (1937) and is in the<br> Roud Index of Folk Songs as #4299.<br> A manuscript variant of "Take This Hammer" from 1915 was published by the folklorist and<br> English professor Newman Ivey White. In the 1920s, folklorists, notably Dorothy Scarborough (1925)<br> and Guy Johnson and Howard W. Odum (1926), also collected transcribed versions. Scarborough's<br> short text, published in her book, On The Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925), is the first version<br> published under the title "Nine-Pound Hammer".<br> John Lomax and his son Alan made a number of field recordings of this song in various prison farms<br> throughout the South.<br> It was commercially recorded by Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Brothers Four, Johnny Cash,<br> The Greenbriar Boys, Mississippi John Hurt, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Sonny Terry &<br> Brownie McGhee, Cat Stevens, Ralph Stanley and others.<br> <br> <br>
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