John the Conqueror

John the Conqueror, also known as High John the Conqueror, John, Jack, and many other folk variants, is a deity from the African-American spiritual system called hoodoo. Due to there being little early written information on the John the Conqueror root, many of the earliest mentions are from oral traditions and in tales from escaped slaves like Frederick Douglass in his autobiography "Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave," published in 1845. He is associated with the roots of Ipomoea purga, the John the Conqueror root or John the Conqueroo, a plant native to the South-eastern United States. Tales of magical powers are ascribed in African-American folklore to the plant, especially among practitioners of Hoodoo. Muddy Waters mentions him as Johnny Cocheroo in the songs "Mannish Boy" and "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man". In "Mannish Boy", the line is "I think I'll go down/To old Kansas too/I'm gonna bring back my second cousin/That little Johnny Conqueroo". This line is borrowed from the Bo Diddley song "I'm a Man", to which "Mannish Boy" is an answer song.