There are about a million songs out there about John Henry, but this video is something special- not just because of John Jackson’s heartbreaking version of the tale, but because the guy who posted it on youtube is clearly involved with his own competition to the death with TiVo. I’ll be damned if a VHS camera pointed at a television tube can’t do the exact same job, plus it’s got character!

Justin Townes Earle may have the best recent version of the song. “They killed John Henry, but they won’t kill me.” Damn straight. I think we can all agree, looking back on the tale of John Henry, we an all agree, John should have taken some night classes and learned to use that machine and gotten a job operating it, and then turned the machine on his co-workers and bosses and slaughtered them all in a marvelous display of technology and fuck you, but hey hindsight’s 20-20.

Isbell, on the other hand, helps remind us just how fucked we are with the mention of one word: K-Mart. Shit.