“Finally, after the turn of the century had seen the song of John Henry preserved among miners, convicts and trackliners, the ballad appeared to scholars…. In 1909, Louise Rand Bascom, a Wellesley student home for the summer in Highlands, North Carolina, published in a folklore journal a couplet of a song she had heard… ‘Johnie Henry was a hard-workin’ man / He died with a hammer in his hand.’
“Bascom may have heard of the tune from the family’s white maid, whose two sons were mountain fiddlers. Bascom quipped then that a song about hard work could not really be native to the mountains of North Carolina.”
— From “Steel-Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend” by Scott Reynolds Nelson (2006)