Lord, Lord

I'm reading John Henry Days right now--speed reading it in fact, since it needs to be read by tomorrow and there's a paper due 10 May on it. But I have a truly fantastic idea for the topic.

The line from the song/legend of John Henry that has always stuck with me is "he died with his hammer in his hand." I remember reading an alternate version where he just up and walks over the mountain and into the sky, but that's not the point.

What I want to write about it--how do our legends die? How do their deaths give them greater life? What about this theme of self-sacrifice that runs throughout every hero's story from Jesus to Spiderman? How do our pop culture heros die? Buddy Holly? Jean-Michel? Kurt Cobain? What is it about death--or Harper Lee type obscurity--that makes someone more heroic? What if John Henry hadn't died? What if he'd gone back to Peggy Ann and she'd made him some bacon and they made love and he got up and went back to work the next day, knowing that the machine was going to win someday? Knowing that he might as well have died, because he was obsolete from the moment the steam engine came? What about death while living?

How do our heros die? Why do we love them for their deaths? Superman's died. Spiderman's died. Who else? Martin Luther King.