But in any case a song still sung by countless schoolchildren needs to be better remembered in connection with these complex cultural contexts. It’s possible that the unceasing and dreary work performed by the song’s speaker reflects labor and/or racial histories beyond these troublingly stereotyping and mythologized elements. The enduringly popular song “ I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” originated with 1894’s “Levee Song,” a minstrel show text performed in a stereotypical dialect and featuring lines such as “Sing a song o’ the city/Roll dat cotton bale/N***** ain’t half so happy/As when he’s out of jail.” By the time the song was first recorded in the 1920s much of that section had been cut, but the verses that have been retained likewise connect to stereotypical representations of Black history, as in the character of “Dinah,” which was a common 19 th century name for a symbolic enslaved woman. While Henry’s folklore overtly identifies his race as part of the story, another late 19 th century folk text has become frustratingly disconnected from its complex cultural origins. While the realities behind this folklore are ambiguous, historians have connected Henry’s story to early 1870s work on the Chesapeake & Ohio (C&O) Railway’s Big Bend Tunnel in Talcott, West Virginia - and have also discovered that Henry himself might well have been incarcerated during Reconstruction and leased by his warden to the C&O Railway. One of the first uniquely American folk heroes was John Henry, the prodigiously strong and seemingly tireless African American railroad worker whose ability to outwork a machine in hammering out a tunnel became the source of countless folktales and songs. Two folk stories from the same late 19 th century period as those first national strikes symbolize the Dream’s idealized myths and far more complex realities. The stories of Black railroad workers, for example, reflect how such communities have embodied both the possibilities and the limits of the American Dream. However this particular labor conflict continues to play out, the moment offers an opportunity for a broader conversation about the multi-layered history of American railroad workers. With the assistance of the Biden Administration’s Department of Labor, the railroad workers’ unions and management seem to have come to a deal that is agreeable to both sides and that would avert a potentially crippling national strike. And despite all that has changed in the railroad industry and nation alike over the century-and-a-half since those influential early strikes, these 21 st century debates have revealed that railroad workers continue to face extreme and exploitative conditions. Many of America’s first such national collective labor actions in the late 19 th century centered on railroad workers and their unions, from the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 to the Pullman Strike of 1894. In recent weeks, railroad workers have retaken a prominent place in our national conversations over labor rights and collective action. This series by American studies professor Ben Railton explores the connections between America’s past and present.
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