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John Henry

noun, plural John Henries for 1.

Informal. a person's signature.

U.S. Folklore. a legendary black man of exceptional strength and stamina.

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Origin:
1910–15, Americanism; from the proper name

Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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John Henry is always a great word to know.

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the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

a chattering or flighty, light-headed person.

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Encyclopedia Britannica

Encyclopedia

John Henry

hero of a widely sung U.S. black folk ballad. It describes his contest with a steam drill, in which John Henry crushed more rock than did the machine but died "with his hammer in his hand." Writers and artists see in John Henry a symbol of man's foredoomed struggle against the machine and of the black man's tragic battle with the white man.

Learn more about Henry, John with a free trial on Britannica.com.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 2008. Encyclopedia Britannica Online.
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"Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in social oppression. And—again excepting the animal fables—it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes—and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them—in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story."

-Saunders Redding

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