Ben LaMar Gay –– the Chicago born composer, improviser, instrumentalist, and musical folklorist –– shares a new single “John, John Henry,” his singular interpretation of an American myth and the latest offering from his upcoming album Yowzers (out June 6th, 2025).
“The Ballad Of John Henry” — the song about a freedman working as a steel driver — boasts a rich tradition of interpretation, performed by everyone from Lead Belly and Dave Van Ronk on through to Songs: Ohia and Rhiannon Giddens.
Even among that varied crowd, Ben LaMar Gay’s “John, John Henry” is an outlier. It begins with doomy oscillations and click-clack electronic rhythm loops hovering atop a disjointed swing beat, before Gay and his choir (with singers Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu) enter in an exuberant chorus. But their joyful verve starkly contrasts the subject matter, as Gay’s lyrical embellishment on the dusty-yet-timeless tale of human versus machine has flipped it into a story about humans versus systemic violence. The singers get caught in an unexpected crossfire of bullets, but are protected by Gay’s version of the hero John Henry – a cousin who has “always held cold steel in hand,” and who knows his destiny is “the hammer will be the death of me.” The panicked singers cry “John Henry, the block is caving in!” to which the hero replies, “ain’t nothing but my hammer sucking wind.”
This type of fresh, pertinent, personalised reimagination is how Gay has managed to surprise consistently across his body of work. His ongoing exploration and expansion of folklore is perhaps the main thing that bridges all the disparate elements of his oeuvre.
Gay shares: “The intriguing thing about folklore is how it allows you to experience the depth of time, and the beauty of spreading information by word of mouth… The fact that only certain folk songs survive the test of time makes me wonder about the coded gems that live inside this information and the necessity of the eternal whisper in which it travels. I was young the first time I heard the name, “John Henry.” It was blasting from a cartoon on T.V. “JJJJohnnn Henryyyy!” echoed through the house and stayed. My experience with the legend up to now has been similar to playing telephone, the game where people form a circle to relay a quiet whisper of a message sent from another side of the circle. My version of the John Henry legend is me dealing with the moment when that eternal whisper finally finds my ear, inside the circle. “John, John Henry” can be heard as an extension of the perpetual theme “Man vs Machine” or “Man vs System”. One American moment. One American crossfire. It’s also an ode to the big cousin we all have who somehow believes in us and vows to protect us.”
About Ben LaMar Gay
Ben LaMar Gay is a genuine original. An imbued composer, conjurer, channeler of cosmopolitan Blues and patently eclectic artist who Jeff Parker calls “hands down, one of my favorite musicians on the planet today.” Gay is a Southside Chicago native who was raised in the tutelage of the legendary AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians). With his first instrument, the cornet, and an intuitive sense of self-production, in youth he traversed the diversity of the city’s music scenes (jazz, hip hop, house, electronic, rock, avant-garde, salsa, latin jazz, et al) before embarking on a several-year residential relocation to Brazil. Beloved by listeners and collaborators alike for his ability to absorb and poetically refract the sound of any context he’s immersed in, Gay’s return home to Chicago in the early 2010s marked the beginning of a compositional output that has since been referred to by WIRE Magazine as “Pan-Americana.” As elusive as he is prolific, across seven under-the-radar years of work Gay diligently composed, produced and recorded seven collections of original music before compiling and issuing his unreleased ‘greatest hits’ as a debut album – Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun – for International Anthem in 2018. Also in 2018 Gay composed an original score for the Tribeca award-winning short doc The Good Fight.
In 2019, he composed an original score for the Brazilian underground carnival profile This Is Bate Bola, and debuted new music commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Also in 2019, he composed and performed a duet with the DuSable Bridge while it was raised over the Chicago River. For Time:Spans Festival 2021, at DiMenna Center for Classical Music in New York City, Gay debuted a new composition – “Known Better. Still Lit” – that was commissioned and performed by Wet Ink Ensemble. Later in 2021, Gay released the critically-acclaimed album Open Arms to Open Us via International Anthem & Nonesuch Records.
In 2022 he released Certain Reveries, an album of duo compositions on International Anthem, and an accompanying film – “Balogun,” in tribute to the late Eddie Harris – which he staged, directed, filmed, and scored entirely himself. In 2023, Gay was a Mellon Foundation Archives Innovation Fellow with Theaster Gates’s Rebuild Foundation in Chicago. As composer in residence with The National Theater of France in 2024, Gay wrote original music for Dorothee Muyaneza’s “Inconditionelles.” In June 2025, Gay releases Yowzers via International Anthem
