Regarding the verses which I posted above from "Spike Driver Blues" and the John Henry hammer songs, they play an important part in helping us to understand the significance of the John Henry legend. They expose for us the harsh realities that many black laborers--whether they worked for wages or on a chain gang or other prison work gang--lived with each day: brutally hard work and the possibility of death or disabling injury on the job. Many African Americans who sang and told stories about John Henry did exhausting and dangerous work in tunnel, railroad, and levee construction. They also worked in mines. John Henry was a hero to them all, but the hammer songs they sang show us that the hammer could be not just a symbol of work, but also of death. I view these songs to be protests against the poor treatment of black laborers, and the attitude that they were expendable That attitude was reflected in the saying “Kill a mule, buy another. Kill a ni**er, hire another” that often appears in books about the blues and black history.