Who wrote the orginal song John Henry?

Answer 1

I can give only a generic answer.

Songs about most of the rail legends, Casey Jones, John Broady (Wreck of Old 97), Ben Newberry (not as famous as Casey, but he got just as dead), Jesus Garcia (Mexico's Casey Jones) and John Henry among them, were first written primarily by the railroaders who worked with the legends.

As an example, the Ballad of Casey Jones was written about the Great One by a black roundhouse engine wiper, and Mr. Garcia by his fireman, whose name is known but to history.

Answer 2

It seems to be debatable read this
http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/tales/JHenry.htm

John Henry is an American mythical (usually African-American) folk hero, who has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels.
Mythology
Like other "Big Men" such as Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill, and Iron John, John Henry served as a mythical representation of a particular group within the melting pot of the 19th-century working class. In the most popular story of his life, Henry is born into the world big and strong. He grows to be one of the greatest "steel-drivers" in the mid-century push to extend the railroads across the mountains to the West. The complication of the story is that, as machine power continued to supplant brute muscle power (both animal and human), the owner of the railroad buys a steam-powered hammer to do the work of his mostly black driving crew. In a bid to save his job and the jobs of his men, John Henry challenges the inventor to a contest: John Henry versus the steam hammer. John Henry wins, but in the process, he suffers a heart attack and dies.

In modern depictions John Henry is usually portrayed as hammering down rail spikes, but older songs instead refer to him driving blasting holes into rock, part of the process of excavating railroad tunnels and cuttings.
Historicity
The truth about John Henry is obscured by time and myth, but one legend has it that he was a slave born in Alabama in the 1840s and fought his famous battle with the steam hammer along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Talcott, West Virginia. A statue and memorial plaque have been placed along a highway south of Talcott as it crosses over the tunnel in which the competition may have taken place.

The railroad historian Roy C. Long found that there were multiple Big Bend Tunnels along the C&O rail line. Also, the C&O employed multiple black men who went by the name "John Henry" at the time that those tunnels were being built. Though he could not find any documentary evidence, he believes on the basis of anecdotal evidence that the contest between man and machine did indeed happen at the Talcott, West Virginia site due to the presence of all three (a man named John Henry, a tunnel named Big Bend, and a steam-powered drill) at the same time at that place.

The part-time folklorist John Garst has argued that the contest instead happened at the Coosa Tunnel or the Oak Mountain Tunnel of the Columbus and Western railroad (now part of Norfolk Southern) in Alabama in 1887. He conjectures that John Henry may have been a man named Henry born a slave to P. A. L. Dabney, the father of the chief engineer of that railroad, in 1844.

The song has many written versions and seems to come from different people over time.

Answer 3

Good question, I will look into it 4 u!