"Take This Hammer" is a prison, logging, and railroad work song, which has the same Roud number as "Nine Pound Hammer", with which it shares verses. "Swannanoa Tunnel" is similar. For almost a hundred years after the abolition of slavery, convicts, mostly African American, were leased to work as forced labor in the mines, railroad camps, brickyards, turpentine farms and then on road gangs of the South. Forced labor on chain gangs, levees and huge, plantation-like prison farms continued well into the twentieth century. It was not unusual for work songs like "Take this Hammer" and its "floating verses" to drift between occupations along with the itinerant laborers who sang them. The elements of both the ballad "John Henry" "John Henry" and the "Take This Hammer" complex appear to date from the late nineteenth century, probably the 1870s. It was printed in John and Alan Lomax's Best Loved American Folk Songs (1937) and is in the Roud Index of Folk Songs as #4299. A manuscript variant of "Take This Hammer" from 1915 was published by the folklorist and English professor Newman Ivey White. In the 1920s, folklorists, notably Dorothy Scarborough (1925) and Guy Johnson and Howard W. Odum (1926), also collected transcribed versions. Scarborough's short text, published in her book, On The Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (1925), is the first version published under the title "Nine-Pound Hammer". John Lomax and his son Alan made a number of field recordings of this song in various prison farms throughout the South. It was commercially recorded by Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Brothers Four, Johnny Cash, The Greenbriar Boys, Mississippi John Hurt, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Cat Stevens, Ralph Stanley and others.