Both Guy Johnson and Louis Chappell elicited testimony about John Henry. Johnson advertised for information in all of the nation's biggest newspapers for African Americans, and I think that's where most of his responses came from. Chappell doesn't address his methods, but somehow he covered pretty good territory, since his book contains versions of "John Henry" from Kentucky, the U. S. S. Pittsburgh, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Both visited the vicinity of Great Bend Tunnel and interviewed a considerable number of people, including about a dozen men who had worked on the construction of that tunnel. These reports and interviews are contained in Johnson's and Chappell's books, 1929 and 1933, and many of them are repeated in Brett Williams' excellent "John Henry: A Biobibiography" (Greenwood Press, 1983), which contains chapters entitled "The Trail of John Henry," "John Henry's Career in Song," "Analyzing the John Henry Tradition," and "Tributes to John Henry in Literature and Art," among others. These three books are surely the best sources. They include many reports from people who were not first- or second-hand informants, and, as far as I can tell, most of what they have to say isn't very useful.

In addition, there are tales of John Henry among Central of Georgia employees and citizens of the Leeds, Alabama, area. Some of these are given in Central of Georgia Magazine (aka The Right Way), 1930, and in a news account published in the Atlanta paper in 1955. The latter contains a report from a woman whose daddy (as I recall) gave her the "real story" on John Henry, that he didn't die in the contest but instead was killed by his boss after they got back to Mississippi. The "back to Mississippi" part of this supports the Mississippi-Alabama scenario - I'm inclined to disregard the "killed by his boss" part, although some of the songs suggest tension between them.

Relatively few straight-out oral legends about John Henry seem to have been collected, and those I've seen tend to be tall tales.