Hard Hat And A Hammer

Jackson releases his single, Hard Hat And A Hammer, from his album, Freight Train.Jackson:

I get a credit on this album [as a musician]. I play the anvil. Hard Hat and a Hammer has an anvil in there. I said, ‘Man, this thing needs somebody hitting an anvil with a hammer. [Producer Keith Stegall] came out to the house one day with his engineer because I’ve got an anvil that was my daddy’s. It’s mounted on a telephone pole and the back of it’s broken off. He got it when he worked for the county farm. They gave it to him because it was broken, I guess. It stayed in our garage my whole life, daddy’s shop garage. Man, I beat on a lot of parts and steel on that thing, and he did too. When he died, I got a lot of his stuff. And that anvil’s in my car museum garage there. Keith came out and we took a hammer and it didn’t sound right. Finally, we had to get two or three hammers and found one that sounded right. That’s what’s on the record. I sat there and beat on that anvil, so I get that credit… the hammer that worked was a hammer that had a steel handle instead of the wood. That’s the one that sounded best. I think you hear the hammer more than you hear the anvil.