Nine Pound Hammer: A Song History

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"Nine Pound Hammer" belongs to a large and tangled family of hammer songs that the Traditional Ballad Index gathers under the title "Take This Hammer," along with relatives such as "Roll On, John," "Roll On, Buddy" and "Spike Driver Blues."[1] In the Index's summary, these are work songs in which a laboring prisoner plans to slip away from the job, and the singer measures his own fate against that of John Henry, the legendary steel driver.[1] The Index traces the family's earliest printed text to a Jamaican collection of 1907 and dates the "Nine Pound Hammer" form to 1927; one contributor has proposed indexing that form as a separate song, a split the editor judged "probably right" but has not made, and the notes add that the boundary between this family and "Swannanoa Tunnel" is hard to draw.[1]

Bronze relief of a miner in a cap, seen in profile, gripping his tool

Constantin Meunier, The Miner, bronze, 1904. A Belgian miner, shown for the hard labor of the hammer songs; it has no connection to the song.

The earliest recording under this title in the sources consulted here was made in New York on May 13, 1927, by Al Hopkins's string band, billed on Brunswick as the Buckle Busters, with Charlie Bowman and Elvis Alderman on fiddles.[2] Other early country musicians soon followed: Grayson and Whitter recorded it for Victor in 1928, Frank Blevins and His Tar Heel Rattlers had a version on Columbia that same year, and the Monroe Brothers released it on Bluebird in 1936 as "Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy."[1] Merle Travis recorded it for Capitol in 1946.[1] Travis, raised in a family that farmed tobacco and mined coal, also placed it among the eight numbers on his album of folk songs.[3] Lorinda Jones sets it in DAA tuning for Traditional Playing Of The Mountain Dulcimer, a 121-page Fingers Of Steel book that pairs a short introduction with 22 traditional songs, each with MP3 play-along tracks for learning by ear.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Nine Pound Hammer"

Sources

  1. The Traditional Ballad Index: "Take This Hammer".
  2. Discography of American Historical Recordings: "Brunswick matrix E23128-E23129. The nine pound hammer / Buckle Busters ; Al Hopkins".
  3. Kentucky Music Hall of Fame and Museum: "Merle Travis".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Lorinda Jones, Traditional Playing Of The Mountain Dulcimer".
  5. Image: Constantin Meunier, The Miner, bronze, 1904. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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