Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff, which
Speaker 1: is a podcast that has some people on it. One
Speaker 1: of them is me. I'm Margaret Kiljoy. One of them
Speaker 1: is prop h prop.
Speaker 2: Hey kill Joy continue to.
Speaker 1: Body The worst part is this is several days later
Speaker 1: and we've stayed on zoom and prop has just been
Speaker 1: body rolling.
Speaker 2: My back is killing me. Yeah, but I want to
Speaker 2: be known for committing to the bit. Yeah, you just
Speaker 2: you commit.
Speaker 1: That's true, Sophie. Should I commit to the bit of
Speaker 1: pretending like your last name is podcast, It's not as
Speaker 1: good of a bit. Maybe it's not worth committing to.
Speaker 1: Sophie is our producer? What about produce Well? You could
Speaker 1: be produced well prod Well. How do well sounds like
Speaker 1: a name, Sophie Prodwell? That sounds sexual. I take it back,
Speaker 1: it does. Was sorry, she's cleaning her.
Speaker 2: You're out right now right? Ian?
Speaker 1: Your our fate is in your hands. It's up to
Speaker 1: you whether you leave that or cut that out. It's
Speaker 1: just Sophie, all right, Sophie. Uh yeah, Sophie's a producer.
Speaker 1: Ian is our audio engineer on woman song Hi end
Speaker 1: I almost.
Speaker 2: Forgot and the body Roller. I'm not currently d the
Speaker 2: body Roll Prop the body roller, don't stop the body roll.
Speaker 1: You can get body roll tattooed on your knuckles if
Speaker 1: you want.
Speaker 2: Dog that's whatever.
Speaker 3: Yeah, favorite things to do is to tell you what
Speaker 3: you could get tattooed on your knuckles.
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially if it's four letters, you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, perfect, Yeah, perfect, Yeah, hilarious. On Woman
Speaker 1: has the person who wrote a theme song on Woman
Speaker 1: has an album coming out. New album coming out called
Speaker 1: Desire Paths out September twenty second. Prop has a new
Speaker 1: album that came out in June. I can't remember the
Speaker 1: name off the top of my head.
Speaker 2: Terrorform the possibility that's right, is that the third in
Speaker 2: the trilogy? That was the fourth, the fourth four.
Speaker 4: The trilogy in the quadrus something Yeah, yeah, the fourth
Speaker 4: and final man the opis the final, the opus minimis
Speaker 4: magnus the magnum p I.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's cool. People don't really do that much anymore.
Speaker 1: Like we're in a very like single culture let alone
Speaker 1: album culture let alone, a like arc.
Speaker 2: Like this was a book and then the book had
Speaker 2: four EPs and a cold Brew. Yeah, you know, this
Speaker 2: was a four year process. I like that.
Speaker 1: The cold Brew is the same name. It's good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, man, same world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gonna start a new killed terraform.
Speaker 2: I mean I might as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah that's what you need more more projects.
Speaker 2: I absolutely need more. Yeah, so I do need more money.
Speaker 2: So does y'all subscribe to Cooler Zone Media?
Speaker 1: That's sure? And where we last left off, this is Wednesday.
Speaker 1: If you've started, if you've been listening to the show,
Speaker 1: if this is your very first episode of the show, congratulations,
Speaker 1: you should go back one. For everyone else, Wednesday means
Speaker 1: it's the second part of a topic, and the topic
Speaker 1: we're talking about today is the fact that John Henry
Speaker 1: was a real last person, and he was a cool
Speaker 1: last person, and his legacy is cool as shit, although
Speaker 1: some of it's really messy, but not because of him,
Speaker 1: but because of shitty people. So where we last left
Speaker 1: our hero he is convicted and he's been sent off
Speaker 1: to the Alleghany Mountains to dig through them. Will actually
Speaker 1: not dig through them, actually just a haul mud and
Speaker 1: shit away. But and they're running into this thing. They're
Speaker 1: able to automate everything except the drilling, or they're able
Speaker 1: to speed up everything except the drilling. And you know,
Speaker 1: they have dynamite. They have railroad cars now they just
Speaker 1: need a better drill, enter the steam drill. The problem
Speaker 1: with steam engines for drilling and just kind of in
Speaker 1: general actually is that you need they're really big and
Speaker 1: convoluted and complicated. You need a boiler and you need
Speaker 1: an engine. They need to be near each other, and
Speaker 1: they need to be near where you need the power.
Speaker 1: You can't just strap an engine to a big old drill,
Speaker 1: as much people kind of tried, but not easy. You
Speaker 1: have to transfer that power. Eventually, folks figure out how
Speaker 1: to use pipes to transfer the pressure using compressed air
Speaker 1: to power a drill. Basically, someone else made a diamond
Speaker 1: coded drill where the drill itself was like part of
Speaker 1: the engine. I don't know. Nineteenth century technology is wacky.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Both it sounds so difficult, yeah, and both broke down constantly.
Speaker 1: And you've got these old timey sales people running around
Speaker 1: being like, Hi, I'm an old timey salesperson. Would you
Speaker 1: like to purchase the latest technological marvel that'll increase your
Speaker 1: profits lately and murder just the absolute most workers possible.
Speaker 2: It's the greatest, the latest and greatest.
Speaker 1: That's right. And then the robber barons are like, yes,
Speaker 1: that sounds like two birds with one stone and sign
Speaker 1: me up. I would like to both drill into this
Speaker 1: mountain and kill these people.
Speaker 2: If this dude dies, there's more people, right yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fine, we get more, right, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The amount of American history that is like literally
Speaker 1: tied into like quote unquote we hate immigrants, just kidding.
Speaker 1: We need immigrants so that they can die doing the
Speaker 1: following labor that no one who was born here wants
Speaker 1: to do, like.
Speaker 2: The most bizarre, the just the most toxic, and just
Speaker 2: if we could just give the country a therapist, like
Speaker 2: just the most y'all just need therapy. It's so bizarre.
Speaker 2: And also like I mean speak yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 2: it's an obvious tangent that none of us need to
Speaker 2: go on because we already know. But I'm just like,
Speaker 2: and then the nerve, just the psychological malady of thinking
Speaker 2: that it's the immigrant's fault. Yeah, that you know what
Speaker 2: I'm saying, Rather like you mad at the immigrant because
Speaker 2: you can't get a job because the people are willing
Speaker 2: are down to pay pennies. Yeah, you're not mad at
Speaker 2: the person that says that's gonna that wouldn't gonna pay
Speaker 2: you a livable wage in the first place. That's not
Speaker 2: the problem. The problem is the person that's willing to
Speaker 2: work for non livable I just don't understand, y'all. Math
Speaker 2: ain't math in.
Speaker 1: No, and it's you were seeing that cartoon there's like
Speaker 1: the capitalists. He's sitting in front of a huge plate
Speaker 1: of cookies, and then there's like a white worker who
Speaker 1: has one cookie, and then there's a you know, a
Speaker 1: brown worker on the other side has no cookies, and
Speaker 1: the boss is like, careful, that man's trying to steal
Speaker 1: your cookie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that. Yeah, that's just exactly that. It's exactly that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So before steam drills, when you tunnel through a mountain,
Speaker 1: you do it with humans and you do a dynamite well,
Speaker 1: originally black powder, but you have two man teams. Sometimes
Speaker 1: it's three men teams. It's a hammerman and then one
Speaker 1: shaker who holds the chisel in place, shifting the chisel
Speaker 1: between every blow to make sure it has a good
Speaker 1: bite into the rock.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: That is called rolling. That is where rock and roll
Speaker 1: comes from. Almost certainly. I mean there's a lot of
Speaker 1: different people claiming different etymologies, but the argument I read
Speaker 1: in this history book is very convincing.
Speaker 2: That is called body rolling. That's right, this whole time.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, you're the roller, Sophie is the hammerman, and I
Speaker 1: am the third person. Actually, the third person on the
Speaker 1: team actually just sings. You actually don't want me to sing?
Speaker 1: You keep the rhythm. Yeah, no, that is what you do.
Speaker 1: That is what they sang to time everything involved, and
Speaker 1: sometimes there's a third man on the team literally just
Speaker 1: to sing.
Speaker 2: That's interesting about rock and roll, man, Yeah, you said
Speaker 2: it was pretty convincing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because I'm going to talk about how all of
Speaker 1: this ties into two blues, right, which obviously comes before
Speaker 1: rock and roll. You know, it doesn't go straight from
Speaker 1: these hammer songs to rock and roll, But I know
Speaker 1: more about the blues at as a more known and
Speaker 1: totally rock and roll. If you look up the etymology,
Speaker 1: most of the etymologies that people say are actually more
Speaker 1: recent or they'll be like, oh, it comes back to
Speaker 1: sailors and they're like ships that are rolling or whatever.
Speaker 1: But honestly, this is more convincing because this is because
Speaker 1: this is black culture. Yeah, like that, It's just much
Speaker 1: more convincing to me. So they chisel or drill holes
Speaker 1: then they pack them with gunpowder dynamite, and then they
Speaker 1: set it off. A lot of the digging actually in
Speaker 1: these tunnels was actually vertical because you drop shafts in
Speaker 1: from the top of the mountain, so you can dig
Speaker 1: from more than one or I guess two spots at once. Right,
Speaker 1: you want as many different places to dig from as
Speaker 1: possible so that you can get it done fast. So
Speaker 1: they'll do like three, They'll drop three shafts and then
Speaker 1: dig all directions the conditions. Well, okay, so but when
Speaker 1: John Henry is first shipped out, he starts as a mucker.
Speaker 1: His job is loading broken rock and muck into railway cars.
Speaker 1: We know this because all of the people who were
Speaker 1: sent out that is their job, right, That is what
Speaker 1: the prison laborers were doing. The convicts weren't used for
Speaker 1: the actual specialized hammering yet, and the conditions were This
Speaker 1: is going to shock you, they weren't very good.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 1: I know, you think that these people doing a dangerous job,
Speaker 1: we would hold them as a probably, I mean, they're
Speaker 1: doing a more dangerous job than the CEO, so they're
Speaker 1: probably getting paid more, right, But it actually wasn't the case.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it's pretty valuable to have you have a company. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you would think that most important part of the company
Speaker 2: is the people doing the work.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd think that their overseer was a guy named
Speaker 1: Claiborne Mason who had previously built railroads overseeing shadow slaves,
Speaker 1: and now he's using oversee prison slaves. During the war,
Speaker 1: he'd been a slave master who worked to build bridges
Speaker 1: for the Confederate military. But he had a hobby. His
Speaker 1: hobby was hanging Confederate deserters and anyone suspected of helping them.
Speaker 1: He sucks. Okay, fuck this guy.
Speaker 2: Imagine like that's the overseer from your old plantation. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like you you're like, this is a ship job, but
Speaker 2: at least I'm not a slave. And then you get
Speaker 2: there and you're just like, what.
Speaker 1: The Yeah, it's still the same guy.
Speaker 2: Man ain't dead. How his man ain't dead. We went
Speaker 2: through the old last ward. His man ain't dead ship.
Speaker 1: Because he did fight in the front lines. He did
Speaker 1: the safest work impossible in the war.
Speaker 2: Why didn't you die slow?
Speaker 1: Yeah. The tunnelers, who at this point are black and
Speaker 1: Irish and free, both sides are you know, free folks.
Speaker 1: They drink together and they swap songs at illegal Irish
Speaker 1: run whiskey shops in the evenings. The convict labor wasn't
Speaker 1: allowed to drink at except at the grog shop, which
Speaker 1: was owned by Claiborne Mason, the racist asshole. And is
Speaker 1: a way to get all basically a way to get
Speaker 1: all your money back, right, You drink away all your
Speaker 1: wages and then it goes straight back to your boss. Now,
Speaker 1: I mean everyone else is drinking away their wages too,
Speaker 1: but at least it goes to another worker. You know.
Speaker 1: They built a bunch of railway tunnels. Historians used to
Speaker 1: think John Henry's tunnel was this one called big Ben Tunnel,
Speaker 1: and actually the nearby town there's a statue of him,
Speaker 1: which is cool, But it wasn't this tunnel, but I
Speaker 1: don't care. It's close enough. The rock there at big
Speaker 1: Ben Tunnel is fairly soft, and there's no evidence that
Speaker 1: steam drills were ever used. There's actually specific evidence that
Speaker 1: they weren't used. The holes weren't big enough and shit.
Speaker 1: So Lewis Tunnel is the one that John Henry haunts.
Speaker 1: It is the second longest tunnel on the route. It
Speaker 1: is forty three hundred feet long, which is most of
Speaker 1: a mile. It goes through the hardest stone of any
Speaker 1: of the tunnels on that route, So it's where the
Speaker 1: owners decided to try out these new steam drills. Hand
Speaker 1: labor was at the time digging about one point five
Speaker 1: feet of tunnel a day, and old i Amy salespeople
Speaker 1: were promising seven feet a day from the newest and
Speaker 1: greatest steam drill. So they got themselves some steam drills,
Speaker 1: and they were very prone to breaking down, and they
Speaker 1: weren't usable in all conditions, like if the tunnel was flooded,
Speaker 1: you can still make people go dig, but you can't
Speaker 1: make a machine go dig, you know.
Speaker 2: Sheesh.
Speaker 1: Yeah, parts were hard to source. They actually had to
Speaker 1: build entire boom towns devoted to their upkeep sometimes right
Speaker 1: like yeah, you need like boiler factories basically, and the
Speaker 1: bosses had a hard time keeping workers. The bosses I
Speaker 1: think they subcontracted a lot. They passed a rule that
Speaker 1: their contractors couldn't pay the employees more than a dollar
Speaker 1: a day. So both the Irish workers and the free
Speaker 1: black workers, who were friends because they spent all their
Speaker 1: evenings drinking together, they were like, fuck, no, we demand
Speaker 1: two dollars a day. Which is all of like fifty dollars,
Speaker 1: that's what they were asking for. They're working ten to
Speaker 1: twelve hours of a day at like murder work, and
Speaker 1: they're like, yeah, we want fifty dollars.
Speaker 2: To take that man. First of all, like just again,
Speaker 2: living in any other century had to be awful because
Speaker 2: I'm just thinking smell, I'm thinking temperature, and it's not
Speaker 2: like you had, like, you know, any sort of radar
Speaker 2: technology to when you just you're just gonna drop some
Speaker 2: dynamite into a rock that you standing on like this
Speaker 2: just this is just all of that sounds stupid to me,
Speaker 2: you know, and like and then secondly, I just I
Speaker 2: am continually fascinated by. Me and my wife were just
Speaker 2: talking about this, like there's a like at the school
Speaker 2: that one of my children go to. Uh, there's a
Speaker 2: as an Irish lady there, and me and my wife
Speaker 2: are like, when you when you see an Irish, we
Speaker 2: see an Irish person, they kind of get it pass already,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean. It's like how you gotta
Speaker 2: pass like you get it, you know, I mean, like
Speaker 2: you just kind of already feel like well you I mean,
Speaker 2: y'all kind of our cousins you know, and like so
Speaker 2: you just kind of like I just I've been just
Speaker 2: so fascinated by and I know that that like connection
Speaker 2: has been weaponized and has been used against us. But
Speaker 2: at the same time, like, but the lived experience, I
Speaker 2: just be like, like we talked about in the in
Speaker 2: the this last week so or that's this week's politics.
Speaker 2: It's like yo, like Nat O'Connor, like y'all, she's squad,
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying, Like you just look at him,
Speaker 2: like y'all kind of y'all man, y'all should have never
Speaker 2: been white people like y'all should have just y'all should
Speaker 2: have stayed one of us, you know.
Speaker 1: And like it's funny because like overall, I would say
Speaker 1: that Irish people living in Ireland did performed way better
Speaker 1: about this than like Irish people in the US, especially
Speaker 1: local generations. But yeah, but yeah no, I I yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ones on the ones back home
Speaker 2: for y'all like really get it and like they're like,
Speaker 2: oh nah man man, yeah fuck all that we would chill.
Speaker 2: And I'm like, yeah, there.
Speaker 1: Was an article, there's an episode we did recently about
Speaker 1: some ties between Irish resistance and Palestinian resistance, and like
Speaker 1: Palestinian folks would talk about like, oh, I go to
Speaker 1: Ireland and it's like I see Palestinian flags on the street,
Speaker 1: and like it is like a place where people actually
Speaker 1: respect me. And obviously Ireland is also struggling with all
Speaker 1: these like nativist fucks who are trying to get rid
Speaker 1: of a comorans wore right wing and yeah, you know
Speaker 1: there's like fucking Nazis everywhere these days. But of course,
Speaker 1: but yeah, no, I I keep thinking about how how
Speaker 1: much right the history of the creational whiteness is the
Speaker 1: history of like trying to separate the working class from
Speaker 1: itself absolutely be like, hey, that guy's trying to do
Speaker 1: at your cookie and yeah, but the thing that I
Speaker 1: keep running across more and more is all obviously there's
Speaker 1: so many times where this worked, right. There's so many
Speaker 1: times where poor white people immediately turned around. We're like
Speaker 1: I'm better than someone fuck fuck yeah you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but there's all of these times when they didn't right, Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: these folks they just walked off. Yeah, they they quit together,
Speaker 1: like you know, they didn't even have There's often this
Speaker 1: moment where like the white workers leave and so they
Speaker 1: or go on strikes, so they bring in black strike
Speaker 1: breakers in order to use race to try and divide
Speaker 1: the work with us. And then often actually those then
Speaker 1: the same black people come are like, oh, actually we're joining.
Speaker 2: The strike, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And not always right, but but this time, I think,
Speaker 1: I think this is like kind of a it's almost
Speaker 1: this like throwaway line in the book I'm reading, but
Speaker 1: it's like one of the one of my favorite parts
Speaker 1: of this whole story that I wish I knew more about.
Speaker 1: They like, so they demand that something be done about
Speaker 1: the bad air in the tunnel. Yeah, And I'm not
Speaker 1: certain that they wanted two dollars a day, and I
Speaker 1: don't think it was a strike. I think that they're like,
Speaker 1: all right, well, we're we're just gonna quit and go
Speaker 1: work somewhere else, like.
Speaker 2: Like you, we don't, we don't have to do this,
Speaker 2: like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And the air and the Lewest Tunnel was bad because specifically,
Speaker 1: certain types of rock, if you blast into them with
Speaker 1: a steam drill, even more than hand drilling and even
Speaker 1: more than blowing it up, it creates silica dust. And
Speaker 1: this killed hundreds or thousands of railroad workers in West
Speaker 1: Virginia over the course of like sixty seventy years. It
Speaker 1: doesn't kill you quickly. It's kind of closer to like
Speaker 1: something like black lung or something like that, and or
Speaker 1: asbestos or you know, basically anything you breathe in that
Speaker 1: you really shouldn't breathe in. It slowly destroys your lungs
Speaker 1: and then you're more prone to infection than you die.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.
Speaker 1: So a lot of people died of miner's consumption, which
Speaker 1: was tuberculosis. But also like, oh, specifically related to all
Speaker 1: this shit, When drilling was done by hand, it doesn't
Speaker 1: put out as much dust. And also people weren't near
Speaker 1: the explodey bits because you tend not to stand next
Speaker 1: to an explosion as a general rule. Right, But the
Speaker 1: steam drills they just spit out dust, and so the
Speaker 1: tunnels had bad air, and the workers were right. They
Speaker 1: didn't know why they were right yet. They hadn't figured
Speaker 1: this out yet, right. Hunting actually tried to higher indentured
Speaker 1: Chinese labor once all of his workers left, but it
Speaker 1: wasn't available that far east. He just couldn't get it,
Speaker 1: and he like was like trying to figure it out.
Speaker 1: He was like trying to like talk with like the
Speaker 1: assholes in mainland China who are selling people, and like
Speaker 1: he was like, and he just couldn't get Chinese labor,
Speaker 1: and he's like, fuck, what am I going to do?
Speaker 1: Where can I find people that I can pay fucking
Speaker 1: nothing and send to their deaths? Yeah, the reformer Quaker
Speaker 1: guy had left the penitentiary and the new guy was
Speaker 1: even more hyped about convict labor. No more showing up
Speaker 1: to make sure the conditions are okay. So folks were
Speaker 1: forced to come out from the penitentiary and they started
Speaker 1: doing the actual drilling. And at this point probably is
Speaker 1: when John Henry became a driller, right, a steel driving man.
Speaker 1: And wouldn't it be great if they could just test
Speaker 1: the steam drills, like compared to a human, like which
Speaker 1: one's faster? Really? You know, is it really?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Is the juice really worth the squeeze? Because you know,
Speaker 2: as you're as you explaining this story, that's the whole
Speaker 2: thing I'm thinking about. I'm like, man, when don't you
Speaker 2: just cut your losses? This just obviously we have, you know,
Speaker 2: the hindsight of you know, two hundred years. But like
Speaker 2: I feel like if I was in this situation, like man,
Speaker 2: I don't know if this juice worth squeeze, yeah over
Speaker 2: their yeah, you know. And and I'm like even as yeah,
Speaker 2: like you said, like you're trying to find I would
Speaker 2: be worried about the quality of work, especially if it's
Speaker 2: like you got these like you got just prison labor.
Speaker 2: I'm like, yes, people don't want to be here. They
Speaker 2: not paying attention. I'm just burning money, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean. I'm like, I'm just burning money here, Like so,
Speaker 2: I don't know that would.
Speaker 1: Be but you're burning the state's money, not your money,
Speaker 1: to shade and they just keep providing it.
Speaker 2: I was the piece I was missing. Oh well, if
Speaker 2: it's not my money, then I guess it's fine.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Like the South is bankrupting itself in
Speaker 1: order to finance this kind of work and actually yeah,
Speaker 1: and actually they they don't shore it up right right,
Speaker 1: and eventually it like collapses and kills But this is
Speaker 1: like decades later, collapses kills most people, so now it's
Speaker 1: all bricked up. I might be conflating the other tunnel,
Speaker 1: Big ben Tunnel with Lewis Tunnel. I read about them both,
Speaker 1: but the same.
Speaker 2: Point is it's obvious that at some point this is
Speaker 2: going to happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. So John Henry was never like
Speaker 1: I'm faster than any machine. An evil empire was like, hey,
Speaker 1: we want to run a cost benefit analysis, and you
Speaker 1: are not a free person, so you're going to do
Speaker 1: it for us.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: And this tunnel was built by one hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: men working day and night in three different shifts, cutting
Speaker 1: into the hardest rock anyone had ever dealt with. Most convicts,
Speaker 1: so it's mostly convicts now that everyone else was like,
Speaker 1: oh hell no. And they were working right next to
Speaker 1: the steam drill, so like in some versions of the
Speaker 1: song they're like steam drill on the left, Henry on
Speaker 1: the right. That's just true. There was like they were
Speaker 1: side by side competing, so they're just breathing in all
Speaker 1: of that dust right the entire time they're working. And
Speaker 1: the hand drilling one it was more effective. New boilers
Speaker 1: weren't easy to get and they kept failing. So in
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy one, with the cost benefit analysis run, the
Speaker 1: machines left and the work was finished by hand. The
Speaker 1: twenty five cent a day convicts did the rest of
Speaker 1: the work, continuing for years after the Lewis Tunnel gave
Speaker 1: up on steam drills. Ten percent of the workers died
Speaker 1: any given year during the years that they took to
Speaker 1: build this tunnel. John Henry probably died in eighteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: They didn't actually record as death. They literally wrote transferred.
Speaker 1: But that's what they did for everyone who died, because
Speaker 1: it was like transferred. I think it means like transferred out.
Speaker 2: To the the work site. Passed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, even those who moved off of the dot job
Speaker 1: site often died from the silica dust that they had
Speaker 1: already inhaled. Since they were convicts, they couldn't strike over
Speaker 1: the bad air like others had, and almost all of
Speaker 1: the workers who died were black men in their early twenties.
Speaker 1: No one recorded as death or exactly how he died,
Speaker 1: But yes, the race with the machine killed John Henry.
Speaker 1: It took until nineteen sixty nine for the Coal Act
Speaker 1: to get past and for powered trills to be required
Speaker 1: of collars that limited the dust, and for workers to
Speaker 1: get masks. And there's a there's an old white building
Speaker 1: referenced in some of the songs. They took John Henry
Speaker 1: to the White House and buried him in the sand
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety two, before anyone had tracked down the
Speaker 1: real John Henry, the real story, right, A white house
Speaker 1: on the penitentiary grounds was knocked down and they found
Speaker 1: three hundred Yeah, and they found three hundred skeletons that
Speaker 1: had never been recorded of people whose death had never
Speaker 1: been recorded.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: And they were all clearly prisoners who died somewhere in
Speaker 1: the latter half of the nineteenth century. So John Henry's
Speaker 1: body was almost certainly.
Speaker 2: Among them, most likely in there.
Speaker 1: Yeah dang, But where his body wasn't was in advertisements.
Speaker 1: Sophie's Okay, that's the best transition I've ever done. You're right, man,
Speaker 1: the best I'm.
Speaker 2: You're listen that, Yeah, ten points for finess.
Speaker 1: I can get a machine. I can out podcast as AI.
Speaker 2: Because look, I was locked in. I was like I
Speaker 2: was hanging on your everywhere right now, Like that one
Speaker 2: really got me most of the time, you know, when
Speaker 2: it's happening. I was like, I can't even go along
Speaker 2: with the bit I was locked in, Like where was
Speaker 2: his I was like, yeah, he's probably, Yeah, he's probably
Speaker 2: in that tunnel, man, are you probably in that thing
Speaker 2: under the white eyes? But you know, where he not
Speaker 2: though I was like, probably not in the it's like,
Speaker 2: oh no.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well he's probably not in these ads, but here
Speaker 1: they are anyway, unless you were subscribed to coolers on media,
Speaker 1: in which case you just get the address.
Speaker 2: And you just hear us go and we're back.
Speaker 1: And we're back. So these deaths aren't mentioned anywhere else
Speaker 1: except the internal reports from the prison. There's no newspaper articles,
Speaker 1: no company reports, no private letters, no politicians talking about
Speaker 1: it on the floor of the Senate or whatever the fuck.
Speaker 1: Even though these reports were given to the Senate, right,
Speaker 1: they just didn't look or care. And the thing that's
Speaker 1: so interesting to me about this the no newspaper's bit.
Speaker 1: It shows collusion between ostensibly competing companies because the competing
Speaker 1: railways had bought all of the newspapers in Richmond pretty
Speaker 1: much to talk shit on the CNO. Because CNO, like
Speaker 1: the railroads are big fucking business, right, yes, and so
Speaker 1: they would have loved to have dirt on someone unless
Speaker 1: it's something that they're like, no, there's nothing wrong with that.
Speaker 1: We can't we can't have people like care about dead convicts.
Speaker 2: Just so here's the thing we could we could talk
Speaker 2: shit about them, Yeah, and how everybody that worked there'd
Speaker 2: be dying. But counterpoint, Yeah, except yeah, that may make
Speaker 2: them invest us investigate on us. Yeah yeah. Wow.
Speaker 1: So one thing that is cool though, a bunch of
Speaker 1: folks managed to escape the work camps and go into
Speaker 1: the mountains.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm waiting on the cool people that did cool stuff. Part.
Speaker 1: It's of this, honestly, It's like it's kind of the
Speaker 1: he his legacy is cool, like.
Speaker 2: What yeah yeah did with him?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like, and it's interesting because it's a less political
Speaker 1: cool people and it's more about like all of this
Speaker 1: stuff about music and all this other stuff that we'll
Speaker 1: get to. But like but yeah, no, it's like people
Speaker 1: got out and some people died. Like I don't know
Speaker 1: what percent of the ten percent who died were people
Speaker 1: trying to get out, right, But it would make a
Speaker 1: lot of sense to try and get free of this
Speaker 1: fucking situation.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The first time I came to West Virginia as an adult,
Speaker 1: I was doing flood relief work, mountaintop removal. Coal mining
Speaker 1: was trashing everything. It was causing whole towns to be
Speaker 1: evacuated because of coal dust. So all this shit still happens,
Speaker 1: you know, and the bare hills led to all these
Speaker 1: flash floods that fucked up all these towns, right, And
Speaker 1: so I went to one of these towns and was
Speaker 1: just like literally helping muck out people's basements and shit.
Speaker 1: And I talked with all these old miners and they
Speaker 1: told me with pride that the history of West Virginia,
Speaker 1: of the mountaineers, they probably said Hillbillies, was the place
Speaker 1: where enslaved people, poor white people and indigenous people like
Speaker 1: where everyone ran to, you know, and that their like
Speaker 1: heritage was that they had swapped cultures and fucked.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And there's some myth making there, and there's like some hyperbole, right,
Speaker 1: but only some the mountains are where people go to
Speaker 1: be free.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.
Speaker 1: So some of the tunnelers escaped in the mountains and
Speaker 1: it makes me fucking happy.
Speaker 2: That's kind of rad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Immediately, John Henry became John Henry
Speaker 1: became a symbol and was immortalized in song. And he
Speaker 1: was imortalized in three different ways. And none of these
Speaker 1: are written yet. It's going to be decades of forty
Speaker 1: almost fifty years before it gets written down. There's miner song,
Speaker 1: there's prison labor song, and there's railroad workers song, and
Speaker 1: they're all different and they're all really cool. Roughly, this
Speaker 1: era is when coal mining really takes off in Appalacha,
Speaker 1: especially in West Virginia. Steam engines have been recently shifted
Speaker 1: from wood to coal, and so all these new steam
Speaker 1: engines were powering the modern world, and they need coal.
Speaker 1: The Welsh coal miners had a tradition of singing ballads
Speaker 1: while working, like everyone sings song, yeah, time work right,
Speaker 1: but does so differently with very different styles of song,
Speaker 1: very different rhythm, like you know. And so a lot
Speaker 1: of black rail workers stuck around the area after you know,
Speaker 1: all these tunnels and joined them in the minds. And
Speaker 1: so the two cultures bled into one another, and John
Speaker 1: Henry became a ballad. And the Welsh ballads were not
Speaker 1: happy songs. They were songs about death. They were songs
Speaker 1: about dying, and they were songs about premonitions of death.
Speaker 1: So in this version of John Henry, it's a mournful
Speaker 1: song of a man who knows his sad destiny to
Speaker 1: die with a hammer in his hand. That's the line
Speaker 1: from this part that stays in the modern versions, right,
Speaker 1: And it was set to a tune from the fifteen
Speaker 1: hundreds from Across the Ocean, and it was a slow
Speaker 1: song because the moral of the story of this song
Speaker 1: is don't work yourself to death over you know, like,
Speaker 1: don't let the word bullshit. Yeah, since work is done
Speaker 1: to the pace of the songs, singing a slow song
Speaker 1: kept people working at an even measured pace, right really yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: people are fucking smart, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like minor songs were also songs about how evil bosses
Speaker 1: were and about how women are cheat or bad. This
Speaker 1: is going to tie into some blue shit too, although
Speaker 1: that's less from the Welsh ballad stuff. That's more from
Speaker 1: what we'll talk about later with the anyway, with the
Speaker 1: hammer songs, these are songs about how everything hurts and
Speaker 1: then you die. The earliest John Henry songs are about
Speaker 1: a man who struggled and died a horrible death, about
Speaker 1: how he still was alive underground, haunting the living. Basically,
Speaker 1: the earliest John Henry songs are creepy full car songs,
Speaker 1: which is coolest shit. I really liked all that shit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Up until the nineteen thirties, a lot of black workers
Speaker 1: wouldn't go near the Cno Canals tunnels at night because
Speaker 1: of his ghost, and supposedly this possibly goes back to
Speaker 1: West African especially Igbo traditions about those who die suddenly
Speaker 1: or terribly often like live underground, and their spirits have
Speaker 1: to be warded off, right, Yeah, Singing is one of
Speaker 1: the best ways to ward off these spirits. And I
Speaker 1: think that's coolest shit because singing is one of the
Speaker 1: best ways to conquer fear. So the idea of like
Speaker 1: baking that into your culture where you're.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, it's Igbo, Yeah, okay, cool, it is ego.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so John Henry exists in this sense and
Speaker 1: like I'll actually just literally believe it. There's no part
Speaker 1: of me that's like, well, no, he doesn't haunt these tunnels,
Speaker 1: Like no, like literally, these songs are proof that he
Speaker 1: haunts these tunnels. Everyone remembers that these yeah, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: totally okay. So then convict laborers picked this song up
Speaker 1: too as a hammer song. Hammer songs tended to be
Speaker 1: less narrative. They instead had short lines punctuated by a hunh,
Speaker 1: which was for swinging the hammer right at the end
Speaker 1: of each line, and one of the themes of the
Speaker 1: John Brown one, the John Brown Hammer Song, is you
Speaker 1: know how like racist white people are terrified of the
Speaker 1: black man as like physically powerful. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: song about a black man killed for his physical might.
Speaker 1: And it is a black power song but like black
Speaker 1: power and a raw physical athletic power song, and how
Speaker 1: it terrified white men. The other way that prisoners were
Speaker 1: using it was it got picked up as a fiddle
Speaker 1: song for hodowns in like Kentucky and shit in the
Speaker 1: Hills of Kentucky where go? Yeah, black and white, black
Speaker 1: and white kids in the at least the town that
Speaker 1: I'm reading this particular story about black and white kids
Speaker 1: went to school together until it was outlawed, Like segregation
Speaker 1: was like forced into this part of Appalachia in nineteen
Speaker 1: oh four. So before that, and kids who grew up
Speaker 1: doing this, white and black ex convicts would play versions
Speaker 1: of John Henry John Henry on banjo, and they would
Speaker 1: do it right outside of jails so that prisoners could
Speaker 1: sing it too.
Speaker 2: That's dope.
Speaker 1: You have a fucking hodoun outside the prison.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, ban Joe just unite in us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, both of these styles are songs are still around,
Speaker 1: and there's still John Henry songs in those styles, right,
Speaker 1: But the themes of John Henry that we currently have.
Speaker 1: When I first learned the story, I was convinced that,
Speaker 1: like John Henry is like a hard worker who you know,
Speaker 1: was like proud and shit. I was like, I was
Speaker 1: convinced I was gonna be like some shit some capitalists
Speaker 1: try to sell people on uh huh, it actually isn't okay.
Speaker 1: The third version of these songs comes from another yet
Speaker 1: another black culture, or another culture of black workers, the
Speaker 1: track liners.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons that the South lost to the
Speaker 1: Civil War was that their supply lines were shit because
Speaker 1: their railroads were shit. They were all different gauges, nothing
Speaker 1: was standardized. They didn't have much industry, so building the
Speaker 1: railways in post Civil War South took an awful lot
Speaker 1: of work. Some of that was convict labor, but an
Speaker 1: awful lot of that was free black labor called the
Speaker 1: track liners. These were roving gangs of workers, mostly young,
Speaker 1: single black men. The crews were actually racially integrated. I
Speaker 1: don't think like white workers were in the minority, but
Speaker 1: I don't believe that it was like, oh, you have
Speaker 1: like a white gang and a black gang, and most
Speaker 1: of the gangs are black. I believe it was actually
Speaker 1: Most of the gangs were mostly black, but had white
Speaker 1: makers in them as well. And so these gangs, right,
Speaker 1: the rail gangs, they're proud only the strongest men could
Speaker 1: track line. And they seem to be freelance crews. They
Speaker 1: weren't incredibly well paid. They were paid better than a
Speaker 1: lot of other people, right, but they were freelance crews
Speaker 1: of eight to fourteen men. They got paid cash instead
Speaker 1: of script like so many other workers. Right, And so
Speaker 1: you could go do this job and then come back
Speaker 1: and be like.
Speaker 2: I'm home with some money. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so it's incredibly hard, physically demanding work that paid
Speaker 1: better than other jobs. It was still shit compared to
Speaker 1: what you know, rich people get, but it was livable
Speaker 1: rather than starvation wages. One person's job on the gang.
Speaker 1: I hope they rotated, but maybe they didn't. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Maybe one person is just a good singer. One person's
Speaker 1: job is the caller who sings, and they time everything
Speaker 1: as they're like digging up railroad tracks. Yah. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it literally, like, I mean, it prevents physical injury to
Speaker 1: have everyone pull at the same time. Right of their
Speaker 1: songs are like literally just like you know, women are
Speaker 1: hot in their underwear, Am I right? You know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And.
Speaker 1: A lot of their songs are like, hey, we're strong
Speaker 1: and proud. This rules their Their nickname besides the track
Speaker 1: Liners was the Gandy Dancers, since their work looked almost
Speaker 1: like dancing, and Gandy was the manufacturer of lots of
Speaker 1: their tools. The work wore you down. Most track Liners
Speaker 1: retired in their early thirties to go take up and
Speaker 1: you know that like classic, easy, not physically demanding job
Speaker 1: like farming. That's how are these motherfuckers were?
Speaker 2: You are tougher men than I am.
Speaker 1: That's your's your that's your retirement. Yeaheah, Early, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go be a farmer. Yeah, because these days farming is
Speaker 1: like the definition of hard work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's nothing harder than this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh. Fortunately they had a new and mention the track
Speaker 1: Liners to help them cope with the pain drug cocaine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, at least we can get.
Speaker 1: And so they saw sang John Henry too, and they
Speaker 1: sang it as a ballad like the miners, but to
Speaker 1: them it was an inspiring story about the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff they were into, being strong as fuck and being
Speaker 1: better than any fucking machine. It was an inspiring story
Speaker 1: about a giant, strong black man who could work hard
Speaker 1: as fuck, just like they were working hard as fuck.
Speaker 1: So this is the hustle culture John Henry or the
Speaker 1: Tall Tail Hall John Henry. These were guys who at night,
Speaker 1: they you know, they've been working all day, so they
Speaker 1: get together and do physical feats of strength as their
Speaker 1: main like competition. And I would call that a pissing contest,
Speaker 1: except they also had literal pissing.
Speaker 2: They also had those. Yeah, Doug, these guys are insufferable, man,
Speaker 2: I know, like the.
Speaker 1: Probably I don't want to be one, but you know
Speaker 1: at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like you can have it, buddy, Yeah, you can
Speaker 2: have it. Yeah, I'm just going I'm just going to
Speaker 2: rail this cocaine and yeah, watch you guys lift shit.
Speaker 1: Hey, I'll be the singer again. Yeah, I'll just sing, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I keep rhythm. Yeah, oh crap, I can't do it.
Speaker 1: So there's three versions of the song now, right, there's
Speaker 1: the minor song, the convict song, in the track liner song.
Speaker 1: With all these subversions of the song. Already, this is
Speaker 1: what folk culture does, which fucking cool. Yeah, folklorists like
Speaker 1: conscious academic folkloress. So I'm not trying to talk shit
Speaker 1: on but they conflated them all back together in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundreds. Then these songs kind of started all
Speaker 1: the genres, or at least were present at the start
Speaker 1: of all the genres. It's less that they hooks up,
Speaker 1: we'll get okay. So white America has always been hungry
Speaker 1: for black culture, especially music.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: In the eighteen forties, about twenty percent of free black
Speaker 1: men in the northern cities, like who had that were
Speaker 1: written on official shit whatever their jobs were, like musicianear
Speaker 1: as their job description, and so often like you know,
Speaker 1: traveling folks doing songs, and also comedy was a big
Speaker 1: part of that too, And so the late eighteen hundreds
Speaker 1: and early nineteen hundred saw a lot of these people
Speaker 1: as wandering musicians. By the eighteen nineties, white medicine show
Speaker 1: people like people did medicine shows who were white, figured
Speaker 1: out that black songs were how you draw customers white
Speaker 1: and black into your tent to sell them snake oil.
Speaker 1: By the nineteen twenties, the proto blues musicians black street
Speaker 1: performers were recording versions of John Henry Hammer songs became
Speaker 1: the blues when the home was dropped out of the song,
Speaker 1: replaced with an unvocalized pause, which is I guess called
Speaker 1: a a say zura. And yeah, I realize I'm now
Speaker 1: probably getting in the territory have at least as much knowledge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I get I know a little bit. But this
Speaker 2: stuff's dope, dude, Like if you just enjoy music, just
Speaker 2: the musicality of it, because like, yeah, the hammer song,
Speaker 2: like and you guys, like a listener is like you
Speaker 2: have you actually have more of a picture. You have
Speaker 2: an idea of how this sounds already, you know, just
Speaker 2: to even just you remember, for this kid, that's the
Speaker 2: sound of a man working on a chain, huh, you
Speaker 2: know what I mean. So when you remove that and
Speaker 2: it's just m m m. Yeah. Now now it's in
Speaker 2: the blues because you took out the huh, it's just
Speaker 2: the downbeat of the of the bass.
Speaker 1: Yeah, burn burn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's dope. I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: No, And they like you know, they replaced like a
Speaker 1: thump on the body of the guitar instead of the
Speaker 1: hammer and like yeah, and these were first played in
Speaker 1: the juke joints and roadhouses of the rail workers. Then
Speaker 1: it found its way into cities for rent parties, which
Speaker 1: were basically benefit shows and potlucks for people falling behind
Speaker 1: on rent. And John Henry was an early classic of
Speaker 1: this stuff. These are almost exclusively a black audience. White folks,
Speaker 1: even working class white folks at this point, were like
Speaker 1: walking around humming operas, still in like the Tenets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this doesn't last long. It it's the Blues. It's
Speaker 1: kind of better. Yeah, like, yeah, just sorry, survival of
Speaker 1: the fittest here. But yeah, yeah, so it's white leftist
Speaker 1: picking up on the Blues and John Henry that gives
Speaker 1: us Superman. But we'll get to that later.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay.
Speaker 1: For sort of double the weird white fetishization of black
Speaker 1: suffering blind black men in particular were all the rage.
Speaker 1: Most of these blind musicians only recorded a song or
Speaker 1: two and then died in poverty. They in particular, started
Speaker 1: tying John Henry to the story of Samson from the Bible,
Speaker 1: the strong Man. Yes, he was blinded and enslaved by
Speaker 1: the Philistines, and he prayed to God for one final
Speaker 1: feat of strength, then collapse the empathy that he was
Speaker 1: chained in killing his slavers alongside of him. It's not
Speaker 1: hard to imagine why, Yeah, people make this connection. This
Speaker 1: is how I get into the Like you're like, well,
Speaker 1: how is this story about cool people did cool stuff?
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's like Samson was cool, right, Samson's
Speaker 1: pretty rad.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like John.
Speaker 1: Henry was cool even though it yeah, even though involved
Speaker 1: as death.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, yes, I'm seeing it now. Once as we're
Speaker 2: getting into this part, I'm like, oh I get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. And black soldiers in France in World War
Speaker 1: One brought the blues and jazz with them. They were
Speaker 1: also treated better than they were at home because France
Speaker 1: passed a law that even on US army basis, no
Speaker 1: one was allowed to be racist pieces of shit in France,
Speaker 1: Like you're in our fucking country now, which is funny
Speaker 1: even now that race. France is like a perfect racism
Speaker 1: free society. But like it's not hard to be better
Speaker 1: than the US.
Speaker 2: No, it was like the bar, the bars, the bars
Speaker 2: in hell, like the bar couldn't be lower. Yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 2: like my who I feel like my patriots saying is
Speaker 2: James Baldwin. Is him talking about going to France and
Speaker 2: being like, yeah, oh I'm a human here, like yeah,
Speaker 2: just like that simple, Like well, I mean I feel
Speaker 2: like a human. Yeah, didn't he stayed there, right, he
Speaker 2: was like yes, yeah, he was like, why hear what?
Speaker 2: I go back?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so so France now certainly has
Speaker 1: a lot of this black culture stuff, but you know
Speaker 1: what else is trying to sell probably black culture to
Speaker 1: absolutely today's advertisers.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yes, I was ready for this one.
Speaker 1: And we're back. So internationalists and leftists in Europe starts
Speaker 1: spreading US black culture across the country continent Europe. It
Speaker 1: starts spreading across across Europe. Hobo's in the US pick
Speaker 1: up John Henry songs of course too, and from there
Speaker 1: it entered the growing folk music tradition of the United
Speaker 1: States and cultural appreciation. Appreciation and appropriation are hard to
Speaker 1: sort out. But there are times where it's obviously the
Speaker 1: bad one. Yeah, some of these ones, I'm like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm not really in a good position.
Speaker 2: Yeah, jud sometimes you really got to Sometimes it's like
Speaker 2: you really got to be there because there's like a
Speaker 2: lot of like a nuance about the moment that maybe
Speaker 2: you're not catching. And then there's other times, yeah, like
Speaker 2: if you're in the situation to where like it just
Speaker 2: don't it just don't feel right, Like this just don't
Speaker 2: don't feel right? Yeah, but yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, So this is the this is the most
Speaker 1: obvious example of it being bad. How John Henry became
Speaker 1: one of the first recorded country songs.
Speaker 2: Oh yep, there it is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I heard of this guy. I hadn't heard of him.
Speaker 1: But I'm not a big country music fan. I try
Speaker 1: not to hate on any given genre, right, but there's
Speaker 1: like some genres where I okay, if I like the
Speaker 1: mediocre song in a genre, I like that genre.
Speaker 2: Right, I like that. That's a good way to say it.
Speaker 1: And so I like the standout country songs, but I
Speaker 1: like the mediocre hip hop songs and I like the meat.
Speaker 1: That's a good way to put it all songs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good way to put it, because, like
Speaker 2: you have like for a country song, if it's not
Speaker 2: like Ray Charles, like, it's gotta be like exceptional. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: go on.
Speaker 1: The first country singer widely considered the first country singer
Speaker 1: is a man named Fidland John Carson.
Speaker 2: Got me no clue. Never heard those words said together.
Speaker 1: I almost wish I wasn't bringing him up. He is
Speaker 1: a racist, piece of shit and a poser. He grew
Speaker 1: up in black culture. His first job was as a
Speaker 1: water boy to black workers on the railroad in Georgia,
Speaker 1: and so he was steeped in black worker music. He
Speaker 1: went he learned to play fiddle in Atlanta, famously not
Speaker 1: rural place.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was one of the first members of the second
Speaker 1: incarnation of the klu Klux Klan, the one that formed
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifteen, which was like whatever costplaying as the originals.
Speaker 2: Yeah they're not funny ones.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: He immediately started lying and saying that he was from
Speaker 1: some like white, whitest fuck place and that he's only
Speaker 1: ever been into white shit any of these like rural
Speaker 1: as fuck. That is like his thing now. And he
Speaker 1: goes around and he supports all the racist like politicians
Speaker 1: and shit. He's like, he's the guy who comes and
Speaker 1: plays at your fucking you're a racist politician going around
Speaker 1: on the stump or whatever. He's the guy who comes
Speaker 1: and plays for you. Fidland, John Carson, And so you
Speaker 1: know how we have this problem in modern pop music
Speaker 1: where there's some piece of shit country stars who lie
Speaker 1: about their origins and pretend to be all rural but
Speaker 1: are actually suburban and urban. And then are racist. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like the try it in a small town guy.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah origin story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that is a that's a tradition that goes back
Speaker 1: one hundred years.
Speaker 2: Where your accent from bro, you from Cleveland Homeboys? Hilarious.
Speaker 1: John Arson was the first person to press a record
Speaker 1: that was called Country. He was also the first person
Speaker 1: to press a record that was like released and publicly
Speaker 1: available called John Henry. He stripped out the fact that
Speaker 1: John Henry was a black man. Also, at one point,
Speaker 1: with his music, he managed to lead to the lynching
Speaker 1: of a Jewish man because he wrote a song about
Speaker 1: an accused Jewish murderer and who like killed a white woman,
Speaker 1: I mean was a white Jewish man. But you know, yes,
Speaker 1: got it, got to protect the white woman. And so
Speaker 1: this this accused murderer was dragged out of jail before
Speaker 1: his trial and hanged. Sheesh great after he wrote a
Speaker 1: song about After.
Speaker 2: He wrote a song about it. Yeah, so he just
Speaker 2: so he front of Black grew with black people, learned
Speaker 2: our music, got roped into the racist folks, pretending like
Speaker 2: he ain't know nothing about it, gentrified John Henry. And
Speaker 2: then and he got somebody killed. Yeah wow, yeah, haven't
Speaker 2: heard that before.
Speaker 1: No, so this initial country there is good and awesome
Speaker 1: country music. The first thing that called country music was
Speaker 1: wasn't by or for rural people. It was by and
Speaker 1: for urban white people who wanted nostalgia about the rural
Speaker 1: past that their parents or grandparents left behind, which is
Speaker 1: not inherently wrong. You can, I like, living in the country,
Speaker 1: I could imagine tabbing whatever, but just fucking own it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just be what you are. Yeah yeah, yeah. The
Speaker 2: romantization like and that's something even even in modern country music,
Speaker 2: Like that's something that I'm like, it's that doesn't bother me.
Speaker 2: The romantization of romanticization. I don't know how to say this,
Speaker 2: Like how you romanticize just like small town live urbans,
Speaker 2: it is what it is, Like, I mean hip hop
Speaker 2: does that with like hood and gang life, like like
Speaker 2: this is clearly you're clearly romanticizing. Yeah, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean, because if you was here, Yeah, you like,
Speaker 2: there's there's certain things that you just like, I'm never
Speaker 2: reliving this again, you know what I mean. But but yeah,
Speaker 2: that but to know that like it was, and actually
Speaker 2: that's like to be like the first like recorded actual
Speaker 2: like star Yeah, was a poser. Yeah, is like also
Speaker 2: something that I mean that had happened today five two,
Speaker 2: you know what I'm saying. The first like Megastar was
Speaker 2: like grand Master Caz wrote that, you.
Speaker 1: Know anyway, Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 2: When the industry gets involved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally, that is the Yeah, because that's the thing is,
Speaker 1: it's like he didn't invent that style of music or
Speaker 1: anything like that. I I don't know that he claimed to,
Speaker 1: you know, but yeah, he became the first star of
Speaker 1: at the first recorded and he managed to rip off
Speaker 1: both black culture and rural white working class culture all
Speaker 1: at once at that time and place skewed left wing,
Speaker 1: not right wing, which is not always the case and
Speaker 1: not universal. True, that's part of my own I have
Speaker 1: to be careful about my own like romanticization of you know,
Speaker 1: the anyway whatever, So everyone wants a piece of John
Speaker 1: Henry as a symbol, including surprise entry into conversation. The
Speaker 1: Communist Party, Okay, credit where it's due. In the Great Depression,
Speaker 1: the Communist Party was probably the most influential political organization
Speaker 1: involved in black civil rights that had lots of black
Speaker 1: leadership that was not specifically a black civil rights organization. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the Communist Party started using John Henry as an
Speaker 1: icon of working class black America. I don't know whether
Speaker 1: this started with a white person or a black person
Speaker 1: in the Communist Party deciding this. I know that there
Speaker 1: was black leadership in the Communist Party, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: a majority of it. I don't think this also represented
Speaker 1: the sort of masculinization of the left, because he was
Speaker 1: portrayed in this cartoonishly giant strong man way right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is around this time. It's my best guess, is
Speaker 1: when white socialists in the US move away from like
Speaker 1: humming opera and towards American folk music and blues and
Speaker 1: all this other stuff. One of the main people who
Speaker 1: drew John Henry for the Communist Party was a white
Speaker 1: Jewish New Yorker whose name I forgot to write down.
Speaker 1: And the worst part is I actually literally wrote into
Speaker 1: the script a white Jewish New Yorker whose name I
Speaker 1: forgot to write down because I made that addition at
Speaker 1: the last minute, right before we recorded. And this particular man, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: this synonymous man. No one knows who he is. Now
Speaker 1: the book I read knows who he is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, plenty of people know. Yes, yes, I just didn't
Speaker 2: write it down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, drew him cartoonishly large and powerful, like almost a superhero.
Speaker 1: This has two direct impacts. The less last lasting impact
Speaker 1: is that communist Jews were a understandably communist Jews were
Speaker 1: a huge part of the push against fascism in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties because they had plenty of their skin in
Speaker 1: that game multiple ways.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Yes, So when the US government was looking for icons
Speaker 1: for a multi racial American industrial power, like we're this
Speaker 1: multi racial industrial power, We're going to defeat Nazis, Right,
Speaker 1: there's John Henry. And so the images of the giant,
Speaker 1: strong industrial man, whether he's white or black, in US
Speaker 1: propaganda from this time comes from John Henry as a communist.
Speaker 2: Wow. Okay.
Speaker 1: When I was reading this book, like once I got
Speaker 1: to the part where like John Henry was dead, I
Speaker 1: was like, all right, Like, I mean, like I most
Speaker 1: have done with this story, right, he was dead, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, holy shit, holy shit.
Speaker 2: What is happening. Yeah, guys buried the lead here, guys,
Speaker 2: I know. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The other lasting impact is that three Jewish leftist teenagers
Speaker 1: in New York City, Jerry Siegel, Joe Schuster and Jack
Speaker 1: Kirby or at least anti fascist, but coming from a
Speaker 1: leftist background, I believe they grew up seeing John Henry
Speaker 1: as this larger than life muscle icon fighting for what's right.
Speaker 1: So they grew up drawing comics. A lot of them
Speaker 1: are like John Henry and Space and Shit Right are
Speaker 1: like the first comics. Eventually, his clothes get tighter, his
Speaker 1: skin gets lighter, and you get Superman and Captain America.
Speaker 1: Because that's the thing that these three kids make separately.
Speaker 1: The first two make Superman, the last one yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Captain America or by the way, someone fuck, someone's gonna
Speaker 1: be real mad at me, Bohoka.
Speaker 2: Right, Hey guys, relax yea wherever you are relaxed, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this is relaxed.
Speaker 1: I couldn't afford I tried to buy a number one
Speaker 1: as research, but iHeart was like, we were not going
Speaker 1: to do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, We're not going to spend a million dollars. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So many of the earliest superheroes that these folks
Speaker 1: drew were actually were darker skin too, though soon the
Speaker 1: industry stripped away both the politics and the melanin from
Speaker 1: it really quick because these first heroes were like tracking
Speaker 1: down capitalists who sent minors to their death.
Speaker 2: Let's go, let's go.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So a five foot one black convict laborer guy
Speaker 1: killed in an industrial accent accident is directly tied into
Speaker 1: the origins of blues, jazz, folk, country, and fucking comic
Speaker 1: books and is the model for Superman and Captain America.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 1: And then to go full circle, the last paragraph I
Speaker 1: have in my script, which is actually just ties into
Speaker 1: what you brought up. The very beginning. Black power activists
Speaker 1: in the early seventies taught John Henry to as an
Speaker 1: icon of a strong black man who died because he
Speaker 1: worked for the white man, you know. And the use
Speaker 1: of him as a black power icon seems to have
Speaker 1: peaked in the seventies, but that's mostly because repression destroyed
Speaker 1: the black power movement in the seventies, and so he
Speaker 1: lives on as two separate things, a weird folk tale
Speaker 1: devoid of any political, cultural or racial analysis that's about
Speaker 1: like how we're better than machines but will die, and
Speaker 1: as a working class black Appalachian hero.
Speaker 2: Wow, man, I need a minute. That's you just you
Speaker 2: just made my brain a pretzel? What a what a
Speaker 2: brain pretzel? You know, I know, oh you forget you know,
Speaker 2: like it's hard to say, like use words prop like ja. Yes,
Speaker 2: history is not it's not dominoes. It's not linear where
Speaker 2: this thing happened and then the air we call them
Speaker 2: eras like much later. But everything's happening just like it's
Speaker 2: happening now, Like just everything's happening at once all the time. Yea,
Speaker 2: you know, and of course because we're all on the
Speaker 2: same planet, it is all interconnected. It's just the only
Speaker 2: way for you to be able to focus on what's
Speaker 2: happening is you have to take a piece by piece.
Speaker 2: But it's all it's all happening, you know. And but
Speaker 2: since we don't and I don't know, how could you,
Speaker 2: since we don't study history like that to where you're like, well, no,
Speaker 2: like this was what was all? It's all the time,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean, Like, yeah, that the integration,
Speaker 2: if you will, when someone ties it all together, it
Speaker 2: it's so mind blowing. But it's also like, well, yeah, dumb,
Speaker 2: I mean I mean that's what was That's what people
Speaker 2: because yeah, that's what people do. That's how life is now,
Speaker 2: you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: Like the ship you're doing can have that impact exactly.
Speaker 2: You know, you got like all at the same time,
Speaker 2: Cali had a hurricane, Florida got a hurricane, while Russia
Speaker 2: and Ukraine are in war, while you know, Niche is
Speaker 2: being overthrown, while there's a fire in Johannesburg, while you
Speaker 2: know what I'm saying, so like yet yeah, while China
Speaker 2: is still outpacing us. Like all of it's happening in
Speaker 2: fifty cent through a mic at a lady. You know,
Speaker 2: like it's just it's all happening all right now, you know,
Speaker 2: so of course it's all connected.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, Yeah, No, I there's this it's like meme
Speaker 1: going around where people are like everyone's afraid to go
Speaker 1: back in time because they're afraid if they change one
Speaker 1: small thing, it'll change everything about the future. But no
Speaker 1: one recognizes that that means that we can change the future.
Speaker 1: Like now, small things we do now could totally change
Speaker 1: everything about the future. Like like would we have superheroes
Speaker 1: if John Henry hadn't been born. Probably, I don't know,
Speaker 1: you know, like yeah, but like we don't know, we
Speaker 1: don't know whether they would have looked the same. Everything
Speaker 1: about culture gets shaped by all of these things, these
Speaker 1: decisions that we make even if it's not you know,
Speaker 1: always conscious like I'm going to try and have the
Speaker 1: following effect. But yeah we can, fucking we can. Like
Speaker 1: gut shit done, we can't do and.
Speaker 2: Shit, yes we can. It's so pop, Yes we can,
Speaker 2: Yes we can. Imagining a better future, dude, Margaret, I mean,
Speaker 2: I'm gonna go body roll to some blues hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, gonna learn some pentatonic scales. That's what
Speaker 1: I gotta do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good luck, man, joints is difficult? What yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And and then I don't know. I mean I feel
Speaker 2: like everybody does. You have these just like various like
Speaker 2: lucid memories or like you know, disparate images from childhood
Speaker 2: or books or things, maybe your parents that are passing
Speaker 2: or maybe you had to watch a video in school
Speaker 2: or something, and like, but they're bits and pieces of information. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and and so when you said so even we opened
Speaker 2: when we opened it up, that's what happened. When you
Speaker 2: say you heard of John Henry, it was like at
Speaker 2: bits and pieces of it. That's why I was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I know the story. And then I was like, wait, no,
Speaker 2: I don't wait, yeah.
Speaker 1: I do, but you knew more of the story than
Speaker 1: I did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, so there there. Yeah, just those man,
Speaker 2: i I'm like as a just a fan of the
Speaker 2: show and just a fan of learning like you. Just like, man,
Speaker 2: you just connect again. The birds just all came into
Speaker 2: all came into place right now. Hell yeah, I'm I'm
Speaker 2: so thankful, like I feel gratitude.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I like having you on this show.
Speaker 2: This is good, man, keep doing this. We're gonna we're
Speaker 2: gonna renew We're renewing Margaret's contract. Yeah, we're renewing my contract.
Speaker 3: As long as you guys want to do shows, there's
Speaker 3: a place for you.
Speaker 1: The heat Death of the Universe.
Speaker 2: So the heat Death of the Universe.
Speaker 1: Or are we breathing too much silica dust?
Speaker 2: You know, one of those things.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, if people want to hear your podcast, please
Speaker 1: hood Politics. What's your podcast podcast called?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Uh? Politics with Prop? Yeah, so the Politics with Prop.
Speaker 2: Matt and I are actually sitting on seven songs that
Speaker 2: we're gonna, you know, kind of put out as a
Speaker 2: mix tape do like some song exploders. But we're waiting
Speaker 2: for He's fools to figure out how to do the
Speaker 2: cooler zone on Android, you know what I mean. So
Speaker 2: we're kind of waiting on that. That's ready.
Speaker 1: So it's gonna be a Cooler Zone mixtape. Yeah cool,
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean.
Speaker 2: Cooler. Are we gonna make that? Are we gonna make
Speaker 2: that a thing that's cool?
Speaker 1: Get us an actual cooler as the logo.
Speaker 2: Yo, I'm gonna trying. I'm gonna try to get my
Speaker 2: trying to get my kids to say start saying cooler.
Speaker 2: It's cooler man. Yeah yeah, dad can't do it. I
Speaker 2: think we're too old to start slag. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I can't start slaying. I'm like, but your
Speaker 2: dad's a wrapper.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, but you do like old man, your dad?
Speaker 5: Yeah you rap about dad shit? Yeah yeah. Now terrorform
Speaker 5: cold brew please use promo code hood get fifteen percent off.
Speaker 5: When we did this on the.
Speaker 2: I threw that out on it could happen here and
Speaker 2: sold war coffee did ibbly like y'all got a lot
Speaker 2: of listeners. I like this, Yeah yeah so so yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: do that and follow me on all the things prop
Speaker 2: hip hop.
Speaker 1: Hell yam. And if you are white person concerned about
Speaker 1: what is cultural appreciation and not, one thing that is
Speaker 1: almost always safe to do is buy things from black
Speaker 1: owned businesses.
Speaker 2: Listen, you can't lose. Yeah, I will take your money,
Speaker 2: yeah and appropriate it. Well, I will allocate the funds.
Speaker 1: Yes, if you want to watch me at the end
Speaker 1: of every single episode not remember what it is that
Speaker 1: I'm going to.
Speaker 2: I swear.
Speaker 1: I was like, I spent the whole break in between
Speaker 1: being like, I'm gonna remember the thing that I'm supposed
Speaker 1: to plug and I don't know what it is.
Speaker 2: Is it a live show? Do you have like I
Speaker 2: don't coming up?
Speaker 1: I think so, No, I.
Speaker 2: But I have. Are you running for office?
Speaker 1: I've been thinking about it, but no, I probably won't.
Speaker 1: It gets distracted. Think you know what that would look like?
Speaker 1: Vote Margaret anarchist for president?
Speaker 2: Amazing?
Speaker 1: Well, okay, it's all about music. I have a bunch
Speaker 1: of different music projects. This isn't what I was going
Speaker 1: to pitch, but or promote or whatever. Plug that's the verb.
Speaker 1: My most recent whatever. My most recent is of a
Speaker 1: synthpop band called the Lathe and it is a We
Speaker 1: have an EP out on band camp and Spotify, and
Speaker 1: as Prop pointed out, even if Spotify pays garbage, people
Speaker 1: look at the Spotify numbers in order to determine how
Speaker 1: important someone is, whereas no one looks at band camp
Speaker 1: to say how important is this band because it doesn't
Speaker 1: have an immediate quantifiable number. So, however you choose to
Speaker 1: listen to it, I'm perfectly happy. I hope you enjoy it.
Speaker 1: I'm also in a black metal band called Feminine School,
Speaker 1: and I am not yet in a band with Sophie
Speaker 1: m be good thing.
Speaker 2: Oh oh man, it broke up. Would you say you're
Speaker 2: not in a band with what Sophie me? Yeah? Did
Speaker 2: you imagine.
Speaker 3: Ruined Margaret's career?
Speaker 1: Talent?
Speaker 2: Is that? Is that your achilles heel? Is that the
Speaker 2: one thing you can't do?
Speaker 1: Oh? No, I got, I got Midian auto tune. We're fine.
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna you just sing.
Speaker 2: Look, I don't know what I need to do to
Speaker 2: be in these like group texts or like party situations,
Speaker 2: because I feel like I can't wait, like we have
Speaker 2: yet to like party somewhere, like yeah, you know, and
Speaker 2: like I need to see y'all on it.
Speaker 1: I'm on the West Coast.
Speaker 3: DJ Daniel just remixed my voice onto the I've been
Speaker 3: asking for a cool Zone Media ending jingle since we
Speaker 3: decided we were going to do Cool Zone Media, and
Speaker 3: they just finalize that, so maybe I could be in
Speaker 3: a band.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, well that sounds dope to me.
Speaker 1: Is your plug that everyone should go listen to your band?
Speaker 3: No, my plug is that everyone should go listen to
Speaker 3: your band and go listen to Prop's new album.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, bye.
Speaker 3: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 3: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media,
Speaker 3: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 3: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 3: your podcasts.