"Where John Henry Fell Dead"

John Henry had a little woman,
The dress that she wore was red,
She went down the track and she never came back,
Said she was going where John Henry fell dead.

There was a time in my life when I listened to a lot of old songs, dirt music, folk, blues, shape-note singing, and believed in a strange theory: that the fact that “red” and “dead” rhymed, the fact that that the line “went down the track” demanded that “she never came back,” that “blue” and “you” were inseparable meant that in spite of the utopia we thought we were promised in words, we were doomed by the rhymes and inner harmonies of our common language to live out the same old sad songs.

I know now that there are many authors of our doom, and fates that the finest machinations of language cannot escape.