John Henry

You know, the kind of people that carve out a life for themselves by the strength of their back and the sweat of their brow.

One of the songs on there is called The Legend of John Henry's Hammer.

It's long.

And John Henry's this kind of legendary African-American strongman.

And he's almost a Paul Bunyan-like figure in terms of his legendary strength.

And he's not unique to Johnny Cash.

He's in some folklore stuff too.

But in the song, John Henry has this job working on building the railroad, and he's drilling holes by hand that they then put dynamite into to blow the rock out of the way to run the railroad through.

Naomi Wise, a little orphan girl, was being brought up by Squire Adams, a gentleman who had a pretty good name in the community as a morally decent human being.

Omi, however, was seeing a ne'er-do-well named John Lewis, who never meant anything about anything serious, except some of his meanness.

John Lewis courted the girl, seemingly until she became pregnant, and he decided that he'd get rid of her in some secret sort of way.

He persuaded her to skip off with him and get married.

Then, he pushed her into the water and drowned her.

I think Doc pretty well summed up the basics, but let me fill you in on the rest of the story.

Naomi Wise was an orphan who was taken in by William and Mary Adams in Randolph County, North Carolina.

Omi, as she was called, took a lover named John Lewis, but John's father didn't approve of the courtship, instead advising his son to pursue the more socially and financially stable Hetty Elliott.

But who knows? Also, I could be remembering the names wrong.

John Henry.

John Henry.

John Henry.

Different person.

Different person.

I think that he would...

Yeah, what would Blue be? Gosh, I think he would do...

Actually, my good friend Kenny, Creole King Kenny over on Twitch, he actually had a really good story because his dad actually was a bodyguard for JYD whenever he rolled through New Orleans.

And when he was talking about like what JYD meant, like in the area, it's kind of like when you hear like the stories of like John Henry, you know, like this mythical man that comes into the town and like everybody loves him and everybody like sees themselves in him.

And the impact that this man had on business, like for, for Bill Watts to be able to drop his racism and to push, to push JYD as his, as his top guy in the South because he recognizes what that means.

And at that time, you know, when we're talking about combat sports in the 80s and the 70s, like Mike Tyson, Leonard Spinks, Muhammad Ali, like you had this – I'm back to Sonia Liston – And you look at, like, the athletes that were big then, like, you know, damn, I'm going to say another name because me and Joe Green, because if I said that other name, I would be in trouble.

It's based off Garry Kasparov.

He was the original John Henry, right? Martyr of chess.

But still, even though the AIs are way out in front, the coupling of human experts with an ai is you know the the current the current grand champion and i think um programming is a hell of a lot more complicated than chess a lot

okay i have a few things one there are chess engines that are based entirely on playing themselves.

This is the absolute version of Steel.

John Henry.

And he is basically like kind of serving as Superman's Oracle or kind of home base person, backup, whatever else.

So he's back at the barn, which is their Fortress of Solitude.