John Henry vs the Machine: Why This Folk Song Still Matters Today

In the Hall of the Mountain King begins with a tiny tune in the low strings and ends with what sounds like the orchestra being overrun. Grieg wrote it for Peer Gynt, where Peer arrives at the Mountain King’s court on a giant pig, considers marrying the king’s daughter, and discovers that the trolls would quite like to boil him. The music follows the scene perfectly: the melody barely changes, but it gets faster, louder, and more crowded. Grieg simply keeps admitting more trolls. This episode follows that little tune after it escaped the theatre. It becomes a murderer’s whistle in Fritz Lang’s M, a Duke Ellington big-band number, a rock instrumental for Nero and the Gladiators, an experiment by The Who and ELO, metal with Savatage and Apocalyptica, synth-pop with Erasure, mounting electronic pressure in The Social Network, and finally, inevitably, music for actual animated trolls. The tune survives because it is almost absurdly efficient. You hear it once. You know it. Then it starts coming closer.

The Imperfect Enjoyment sounds like a polite complaint about dinner. It is actually a seventeenth-century poem about premature ejaculation, impotence, wounded pride, and a man becoming so furious with his own penis that he starts addressing it as a military deserter. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, wrote the poem in the 1670s. It begins with two eager lovers and every expectation of spectacular sex. The narrator finishes almost immediately, cannot recover, and reacts as though something much more serious than disappointing sex has occurred. Corinna, who has considerably more reason to complain, is remarkably patient. What makes the poem funny is the gap between the problem and the response. Rochester’s verse remains elegant and controlled while his narrator completely falls apart. This short bonus episode follows the disaster from optimism to shame, rage, treason, and one extraordinarily generous proposal for solving Corinna’s problem.

One of the most familiar piano pieces in the world may have the wrong woman's name on it. Beethoven wrote the piece we call Für Elise around 1810, but he never published it. The manuscript later disappeared. When Ludwig Nohl finally printed the music in 1867, he said it was dedicated “Für Elise.” Perhaps he read it correctly. Perhaps the page actually said “Für Therese.” Nobody can check. This episode follows the mystery of Elise, but also the stranger life of the melody itself. Those first few notes have escaped the piano lesson and turned up in Charlie Brown, French chanson, Giorgio Moroder, Italian pop, heavy metal, Whitney Houston, Nas, K-pop and Jon Batiste. Almost everyone who borrows the piece keeps the same little turn between E and D sharp. It is hesitant, instantly recognizable, and apparently impossible to kill. Along the way, the episode asks a simpler question: why did this tiny unpublished bagatelle become one of the melodies everybody knows?

A thank-you to Courtney Love for sharing our In the Pines episode on Instagram.

You know Ode to Joy. You may know it from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, a church hymn, A Clockwork Orange, the European anthem, Sister Act 2, or possibly a few suspicious seconds of Mr. Brightside. What is strange is how quietly it begins. Before the huge choir arrives, Beethoven gives the melody to the cellos and double basses: a plain little tune that hardly seems capable of carrying everything later piled onto it. This episode follows that melody from Schiller’s 1785 poem and Beethoven’s Ninth through Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee, the Seekers, Miguel Ríos, Wendy Carlos, Rainbow, Leonard Bernstein, Lauryn Hill, Bright Eyes, the Piano Guys and ATEEZ. Along the way, Ode to Joy becomes hymn, pop song, electronic nightmare, political anthem, guitar riff and K-pop spectacle. The tune survives all of it because Beethoven made something unusually simple: a melody that a single cello can whisper and thousands of people can sing together.