Nine Pound Hammer

Nine Pound Hammer belongs to a family folklorists call the hammer songs: work songs from the railroad camps, the prison farms and the mines of the South, where men swung hammers and sang to keep the swing together. Take This Hammer is the best known of its relatives, and the two share a folk song index number and a stock of verses that drifted from one job to the next with the men who sang them. The family seems to date from the 1870s, and many of its verses carry the shadow of John Henry.

Dorothy Scarborough printed a short text under this title in 1925. Al Hopkins and his Buckle Busters made the first record of it under the name in the late 1920s, and their version added the rolling chorus that the song is known by now. The Monroe Brothers recorded it in 1936 as Nine Pound Hammer Is Too Heavy, and from there it went into bluegrass, where Flatt and Scruggs, the Osborne Brothers and Tony Rice all recorded it.

Merle Travis rewrote it in 1946 as a coal mining song, and his version is the one many people meet first. It is his own words on the old frame, and still his. This page carries the older tune. At a jam it is sixteen bars, and the verses, the chorus and the breaks all go around the same sixteen: the Idaho Bluegrass Association writes them as 1144 1511 twice, and notes that the same eight bars are the second half of Bury Me Beneath the Willow.

On a mandolin the song starts before the first bar, with three quarter notes, D, D, E, the open D course, the open D again and the second fret. Most of the melody is long notes, and the break is what happens between them: a two or three note walk at the end of each held note into the next line, and a chord tone on the first beat where a singer would be taking a breath. The D chord bars both climb F sharp, D, E, G from the fourth fret of the D course, and they are the bars to get even first.