Nine Pound Hammer

It grew out of the hammer songs sung by Black railroad and construction crews in the South, the same family as "Take This Hammer" and "John Henry." Collectors noted fragments in Texas in 1891, and a 1923 letter to the Library of Congress described a verse heard in work camps in West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee.

The bluegrass version goes back to Al Hopkins and His Buckle Busters, who recorded it in New York for Brunswick on May 13, 1927, and added the "roll on, buddy" chorus. Their fiddler Charlie Bowman said in 1961 that the band pieced the song together in the studio from fragments the members remembered, and that he had first heard it from Black railroad workers around 1903 to 1905. The Monroe Brothers recorded it in 1936, and Merle Travis reworked it as a coal mining song in 1946.