Music from the Mines
"The neglect of the camp or patch by anthropologists is distressing to anyone who knows the immensity of coal's literature."
From the first field recording to the latest cover of "Dark as a Dungeon" the music from the mines has been a part of the American identity. This paper will explore the historical and sociological/anthropological background of what has come to be known as "Appalachia." It will also cover the difficulty of placing a proper definition on coalmining songs. Following that I will discuss a couple of major collectors of coal mining ballads and folksongs as well as the history of the songs themselves. A selection of songwriters will be focused on and finally a current synopsis of the state of coalmining and song.
History of Coal Mining in the US
By the 1840s there were several well-developed anthracite (hard) coal fields in eastern Pennsylvania. The first miners' organizations appeared in these fields in the late 1840s, and "the first union, properly speaking, was the Workmen's Benevolent Association in 1867." The
beginnings of the modern bituminous, or soft coal, industry occurred in the 1840s. Bituminous coal is found throughout the US, but I am focusing on the Appalachian Mountain region which consists of western Pennsylvania, western Maryland, eastern West Virginia, western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and northern Alabama and Georgia. Of particular importance and reference are the coalfields of Kentucky and West Virginia.
Prior to the 1850s and 60s the population of the Appalachian region was primarily native-born white and Anglo. During these decades a large influx of English-speaking immigrants from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland began settling in the region. A number of these immigrants were skilled craftsmen and "took virtual possession of the […] industry as mine workers, foreman, and operators." Up through this time the majority of the coal patches were independently owned and operated but by 1880 most of them had been taken over by corporate concerns.
Eighteen-eighty through 1920 was the height of the US coal boom. During this period the Appalachian region was transformed from primarily agrarian to an industrial coal mining empire. During this time "more than two thirds of miners lived as captive town populations" subject to the rules of the corporation which were enforced by roving gangs of gun-thugs, hired by the corporation and often possessing criminal records. As an example of the power these corporations had over the population, Allen Batteau points out that "from 1888 until 1924, all of [West Virginia's] governors were either coal company officials or men who were 'chosen with the consent of the state's industrialists "after certain understandings had been reached."'" The phrase "after certain understandings had been reached" obviously points out the coal companies hidden agenda and role in government corruption.
In 1890 the United Mine Workers of America (hereafter referred to as UMWA)
was formed but seems to have taken little interest in the welfare of its members during the early years. They did succeed in achieving an eight-hour day in 1898, but it was not always implemented by the companies. With the arrival of the coal camps and what was essentially indentured servitude due to indebtedness to the company store came a new sense of class-consciousness and eventually class struggle that is evident in the protest songs.
During the 1920s wages were slashed repeatedly throughout the region due mainly to competitive pricing at home and around the world. Mines were shut down. Strikes and gun battles with their accompanying massacres were happening with increasing frequency, especially in West Virginia. Unions were suspect and organizers targeted. Then came the battle in Harlan County, Kentucky, which "in the 1930s […] became a byword for industrial oppression." Shelly Romalis continues the thought by saying that "the 'Bloody Harlan' strike of 1931-1932, despite its disastrous failure, became (and many argue it still is) emblematic of working-class struggle and courageous labor defiance." Tensions were escalating between the miners and the operators and half way through 1931 the UMWA pulled out, abandoning the workers as the operators in the town of Evarts were blacklisting thousands of miners. When the UMWA backed out they left the door wide open for the Communist National Miners Union (NMU).
The NMU brought renewed confidence to the miners as well as media attention and an escalation in terror and violence. The strike was tracked daily in the Daily Worker and the New York Times. By January 1, 1932, all the coalmines in Harlan County had stopped production. "Operators ferociously retaliated by arming more deputies to harass and red-bait miners, burn soup kitchens, and arrest criminals. By the end of March, […] the depleted NMU organizers left Kentucky," having failed in their attempt to triumph over the coal companies and to indoctrinate the workers. John L. Lewis, the president of the UMWA from 1919 - 1960, along with his union, would return to Harlan County with what Aunt Molly Jackson once referred to as "a real democratic organization."
As a whole the Appalachian people are fundamentalist Baptists with a strong sense of patriotism. Both the miners and the operators considered themselves "true Americans and even truer believers in God." The mountaineers thus had enormous difficultly reconciling revelations of the NMU's Communist atheism with their own fundamentalism. Miners had "only the foggiest notions of what Communism represented." What realizations they had led them to view the NMU and its organizers, however generous and well intentioned, as outsiders and betrayers of the miners' faith, just as the UMWA had done a year ago. Other outsiders, including socially active or radical writers, labor organizers, students, relief workers, and clergy, continued to flock to Harlan and Bell Counties during 1931 and 1932. The most well documented example of outsiders coming to survey the situation is that of Theodore Dreiser, chairman of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, a communist auxiliary organized in mid-1931. He, along with other writers such as John Dos Passos and Sherwood Anderson visited Harlan County in the winter of 1931. There he recorded testimonies from both the operators and the workers. He published their words under the title Harlan Miners Speak. He also discovered Aunt Molly Jackson, who I will talk about in more detail later. Her half-brother, Jim Garland, had this to say about the Dreiser Committee, as it came to be known: "'The Dreiser people were so impressed by her that they thought she was just about the whole Kentucky strike.'"
The rest of the twentieth century saw less violence but not necessarily less struggle for Appalachian coal miners. In 1933, the UMWA was again triumphant when congress passed section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act, which began dismantling the coal camps. By the time the first edition of John Greenway's American Folksongs of Protest (1953) the heavily guarded mine patch and coal camp were gone, and, he added, "the operators' feudal control over local and state government is being broken down." Greenway is not the only one to refer to the situation in the early coal camps as feudal. In the next two sections I will address this further. Through the 1940s and 50s the UMWA ran the respected and democratic union Aunt Molly Jackson said it was. Then, in the early 1960s, due to financial concerns, they began closing miners' hospitals, the UMWA Health and Retirement Fund was rapidly depleting, and they began revoking health insurance cards. On January 9, 1963 President Johnson declared war on poverty and on May 3, 1963 a headline in the New York Times read: "Appalachia is Prime Target in War on Poverty." In December CBS broadcast a special titled "Christmas in Appalachia" hosted by Charles Kuralt, which garnered massive response from the American people. Truckloads of toys, clothes, shoes, and food began arriving in the region but by 1965 attention on Appalachian poverty begin to disappear. Perhaps it was no coincidence that 1964 also happened to be a presidential election year. However, plenty was happening in the region. Strip mining protests were beginning, the Appalachian Volunteers, a summer program of college students formed to fight poverty was getting started, and a new drama began to unfold: mountaineer as victim of human greed. Finally, the late 1960s and 70s signaled the death knell of coal as a major US industry. Miners' were protesting about health care issues, namely pneumoconiosis (commonly known as "black lung"), and the "thuggery" of the UMWA under president Tony Boyle was a hot button issue. Boyle became the UMWA's eleventh president in 1963. He was convicted of conspiracy in the 1969 murders of Jock Yablonski, who opposed his leadership, and his wife and daughter. He died in prison in 1985. In the 1970s the industry was regulated by the US Government and the union was reformed. By the 1980s nearly four thousand women had become coal miners.
Sociological and Anthropological: The Invention of Appalachia
The idea that miners lived in physical and cultural isolation is largely a myth. While it is true that geographically the mountains, hills, and valleys did make communication and travel difficult at times it was certainly not impossible. Romalis cites appropriately that "notions of a backward population arrested in a time warp attracted a variety of saviors: benevolent workers, educators, song collectors," with preconceived or assumed ideas about what would be found in the mountains. For example, while owning a car was often impractical many families owned a phonograph or radio, even in the 1920s. The phonograph "was ideal for a conservative audience which wanted familiar music, rhetoric, dialect, and values, and it was competitive with many other popular culture forms and devices." The Grand Ole Opry, which began broadcasting in the 1920s, was hugely popular with people in the region.
It is true that mine camps were often located in remote areas, which led to miners being "at times perceived as a rural proletariat. Once miners were into their industry, the verbal expressions 'my daddy was a miner' or 'coal in his blood' helped to separate them from peasants and farmers as well as from other industrial workers." Proletariat is a tough word to deal with in the US (although a more fitting one for miners), peasant even tougher. Green notes in the same discussion quoted above that folklorists here "shy away from the word peasant as if it were contaminated," which I assume is due mainly to the connection it has to European rural agricultural workers. They prefer to use more politically correct terms such as underdeveloped people or developing nation "instead of the more pejorative peasantry. (Our domestic equivalent is, euphemistically, culturally deprived or disadvantaged.)" But at its root the word simply refers to a country inhabitant and, Green declares, "miners […] are sufficiently linked by the centripetal nature of their work to behave, in part, as the peasantry does." He backs up this argument by citing the work of two Americans, Helen M. Lewis and Edward E. Knipe, professors in sociology and anthropology. In the late 1960s Lewis and Knipe explored the impact of technology on a group of miners and their families in Virginia. They invented the phrase "'a case of peasantry gained and peasantry lost.' They suggested that farm folk gave up agrarian modes to become industrial workers, but returned to a status of political peasantry in the sense that many Appalachian mountaineers, including miners, are colonial dependents within the United States;" the colonizers being the coal companies more so than the United States itself. Batteau talks about the region's "exploitation and political subservience" which began in the 1800s. His critique of the CBS special, "Christmas in Appalachia" (1964), when considered in connection with other criticisms of coal company politics rings true. He says that the special "hid the relationships of political domination and corporate predation that were responsible for the region's plight; […it] represented poverty ennobled and perfected," i.e. white, Anglo, and associated with important American symbols of pioneering spirit and rugged individualism. "It did less to inform the viewer about the mountain region of eastern Kentucky than it did to provide the nation with a frisson of pathos in the holiday season."
Batteau's conclusions about the actual invention of a place called Appalachia mainly through the literature from the region are particularly interesting. I was aware that there were stereotypes about the region, which, of course had been created through the passage of time but I had not thought about the entire region being a creation. The first line of his invaluable book is "Appalachia is a creature of the urban imagination," more than an idea, an actual invention.
About this invention he states:
Through a process of invention and media presentation, an idea of Appalachia was established in the 1870s and 1880s. All of the later writing on the southern mountains qua Appalachia has been undertaken sub specie fabula, assuming the idea of otherness, a domestic preserve colored by nature. Revisionist scholarship that has questioned these assumptions has come close to abandoning the idea of Appalachia altogether, or a least recognizing the fluid and shifting nature of its social referent. The making of Appalachia, in the period from 1878 to 1888, was a true act of creativity.
[…] In 1889 the literature of Appalachia began to dwell on the depravity and viciousness of the mountaineers: moonshining, feuding, bushwhacking, inbreeding, and indiscriminate violence became important themes. In the previous decade, the fiction of the region had viewed the mountain people as quaint and unprogressive, establishing an "otherness" for Appalachia. (57)
Throughout his book Batteau talks about the victimization of the Appalachian people. They have had themselves created for themselves by educated interpreters. They are victims of corporations, of nature, of inbreeding, of corrupt politicians, of stereotypes. This is a very curious position for a group of people who, by their own admission, think of themselves as extremely independent. They have consistently found themselves being portrayed as victims in media for over a century, usually by benevolent, well-meaning souls. "Only because the social preoccupations of late Victorian Americans occurred with the industrial entry into eastern Kentucky and southern WV did the Victorian public make the Southern Mountain Region into Appalachia. At another level, though, the making of Appalachia was a political act in which the people of the Southern Mountain Region had little political importance."
Definitions/Theory
"Have we any American ballads? Let us frankly confess that, according to the definitions of the best critics of the ballad, we have none at all." -John Lomax
Once some understanding of the Appalachian people has been reached it becomes necessary to understand the definitions scholars have used to classify their songs. Nearly every reference that can be found about labor songs and folk songs from the region faces the discussion of definitions sooner of later. I have chosen to divide the discussion into two sections, (1) folk culture and music and (2) what Archie Green termed "folk-like."
A common theme that runs through the majority of my sources, consciously or not, is that folk culture would not exist if not for "educated interpreters:" "folk culture exists for consumption by the elite," Batteau says, "with the invention of the tape recorder, the folk culture business boomed." To a large extent this is true. If it hadn't of been for someone like Dreiser, Aunt Molly Jackson may never have been known outside of her immediate area; or consider the influence of the Lomaxes, or Pete Seeger on other songwriters. The work of someone like Child, Cecil Sharp, or George Korson, who all preferred to collect anonymous ballads, seems to contradict Batteau's statements in that they were not actively interpreting the songs they collected but were rather educated intermediaries producing volumes of carefully chosen songs in a way that vouched for their authenticity. Which brings us to the "theme of purity against contamination, […a theme that] persisted with George Korson for decades: 'I wanted these songs in pure form before they had been influenced by radio and corrupted by drug store mineworkers and so-called hillbilly singers.'" I will talk about Korson in more detail in the next section but just to clarify he did not begin collecting miners' songs until the mid-1920s, when commercial records were already being released and sold in company stores under the genre title Hillbilly songs.
Romalis had this to say about collectors and the authenticity argument and its effects on music from Appalachia:
Cecil Sharp imprinted his own notion of real folksong on our legacy (and that of the Appalachians) as he uncovered survivals of the pure English ballad in what he perceived as an isolated, anachronistic pocket of the new world. Representations of an authentic musical tradition through selective collection, sound recording, and commercial distribution continued to define Appalachian regional repertoire in the early twentieth century. We have thus a rather skewed legacy as well as a prime example of how dominant class interests can selectively shape the past. […] Whether these interests are academic or commercial, they define the nature of 'desirable material.'
I believe this "skewed legacy" began to change during the Great Depression and the first Urban Folk Revival of the 1930s, when what was desirable began to shift along with the idea of what and who was "folk." At the same time the idea of ownership/authorship began to change as well. "It is impersonality of authorship, not anonymity of authorship," John Greenway said in 1953, "that is a requisite of genuine folksong." Continuing in the same vein, the author of the folksong is: "not that of a consciously creative artist, but that of a spokesman for the community, an amanuensis for the illiterate, or, to put it more precisely, for the inarticulate." A folksong author therefore "may not write about esoteric or advanced concepts that the folk community as a whole is not familiar with." A folksong is concerned with the interests of the folk and in complete possession of the folk. For Aunt Molly Jackson, folksongs were simply what folks sang.
"Folk-like" is a term Archie Green coined in order "to place [the songs of] miners between the rigid (peasantry) and relativistic (anyone) lines that bound old and new definitions." His goal in Only a Miner was to find a place for commercial, and especially the industrial folksong (a song that "describes work itself and portrays the life, diversions, and struggles of men on the job") beside the traditional folksong. His immediate question, "can an industrial song become a folksong?" came with the following extrapolation: "Does not industry connote urban, mass, and technological life – the antithesis of folk-life […]? This has been the precise posture of many British and American antiquarians who have oriented themselves to country life […] rescuing rural lore from the destructive onslaught of the Industrial Revolution." The oppressive weight of fitting a definition has caused the loss of countless industrial and protest songs. But changing ideas and shifting definitions have increased the number that are admitted into the club: "Giving voice to those once labeled 'inarticulate' has encouraged historians to cast a larger net when choosing documentary materials for scrutiny." Greenway claims that "every song, poem, or piece of prose must be classified either as folk or conscious art, but," he clarifies: "These songs are in the position of an illegitimate child, unrecognized and unwanted by either group. They are not literature, in the strict sense of the term […]. […] When uncounted thousands of songs current among the folk are permitted to vanish because they do not qualify under the terms of a definition, it is time to question the usefulness of that definition." And indeed that time has arrived.
Collectors, Songwriters, and Songs
There are two collectors who have been crucial to my research: one, a man named George Korson, and the other, a friend of his, Archie Green. The two men could not have been more different regarding their collecting interests. Korson grew up in the anthracite region of eastern Pennsylvania and after college began working as a reporter for the local paper in Wilkes-Barre. He grew up hearing miners sing about their work and wanted to learn more, so in 1924 he went to the library. This is the story in his own words:
I asked the librarian, Edith Patterson, for a book on anthracite miners' songs. I knew there were collections of lumbermen's ballads, cowboy songs, and sailors' chanties (sic). So I was sure there were collections of miners' songs.
'There aren't any,' she said, 'but I'll send out a search request to the Library of Congress just to make sure.'
I was surprised several weeks later when Ms. Patterson reported that there was no such collection. I said, 'There certainly ought to be.'
'Why don't you try to collect those songs yourself? she urged.
So he did and he ended up dedicating his first large collection, Minstrels of the Mine Patch, to the librarian. Korson was a self-taught folklorist who was able to reconcile himself to the idea of the industrial work song as worthy of collection. "To his credit he was never a slave to the romantic communal-composition theory held by some of his fellow folklorists. […He] knew that chanting diggers did not collectively improvise ballads. […] Nor did bands or marching unionists spontaneously generate labor anthems on the picket line." But he did assume "that the miners were folk for two basic reasons: (1) Their songs behaved like folksongs [and] (2) Miners were isolated in remote villages, set apart by harsh, dangerous work, and they retained an old life-style." And he believed in folk purity. Korson brought attention to songs of labor and protest but "in an effort to maintain the folk purity of what he collected, Korson deliberately rejected much of the protest music that came out of the coalfields of the United States during the 1920s and 1930s." If he suspected the influence of any union organizers or other outside influence in a song he immediately rejected it. Which is why you will not find Aunt Molly in Korson's books.
The earliest actual recordings by working miners were obtained by George Korson and Melvin Le Mon in Pennsylvania's anthracite region during 1935. In 1938, Korson was provided a grant by John L. Lewis to research the songs and stories of bituminous miners. His interest in recording was for posterity's sake only. Korson viewed commercial records as "agents corrupting tradition," which his friend Green feels "will deny full understanding of the processes of oral tradition to scholars, as the walls between folklore and poplore are breached."
In a letter to Green near the end of his life, Korson stated that his main objective in collecting "was to rescue these [more traditional] ballads before they perished altogether."
Obviously Green had a different approach to the songs than Korson, but he did feel that it was his duty to Korson to continue where he left off. Green was willing to delve into the black hole that was commercially recorded industrial song and protest music and in doing so he was determined to legitimize it. In the opening chapter of Only a Miner states his objectives and adds as a reason for the lack off attention to the music of the mining industry that "it can be generalized that cowboys and clipper-ship sailors were viewed more romantically than miners or steel-mill men, and that early collectors found it extremely difficult to cope with trade-union or radical material when it came to hand." And after all, miners' songs of protest are the largest of any labor group. Green dismisses the problem of outside influence by claiming that "agitators and organizers do no more than stimulate protest that has been simmering inarticulately in the singer." They do not write the songs themselves. But Green concerned himself mainly with commercial issues which preceded and paralleled field recordings and "tried to demonstrate that folksongs and non-folksongs are equally important and interesting as objects of exploration."
Songs and Songwriters
I certainly agree that a non-folk song, or a "folk-like" song is just as important, if not more, as an historical document. That is why I have focused on the more radical songs and writers throughout my research. Since the period after World War II there has been more attention paid to such material, but perhaps not enough.
The recorded history of the coal ballad or folksong in the United States dates back less than two centuries. Korson tells us that from the end of Civil War to 1910 balladry was in vogue among miners. Bands comprised only of miners and group "singin's," "a custom stemming from Revolutionary days," he says, occurred all throughout the coal country. "Two-Cent Coal," The first known published coal ballad came from western Pennsylvania in 1876 and commemorated a disaster which occurred on the Monongahela River. From the lyrics it is unclear what exactly happened. The bosses had recently cut the miners' wages from 3-cents a bushel to 2-cents. It seems there were coalmen on the frozen river along with loads of coal when the ice broke and the men fell into the icy water and lost the coal. The song combines both disaster and a sense of protest, like many of the songs that came after it:
Oh, the bosses' tricks of 'seventy-six
They met with some success,
[… …]
Through poverty we were compelled
To dig the two-cent coal.
Naturally it makes sense that protest and labor songs were present in the United States since the first European settlers arrived. There were protest songs being sung in England at least as far back as the 14th century so the idea is not new. Korson points out that the British immigrants who arrived in the Appalachian region during the 1850s and 60s brought their indigenous ballads with them and then began to adapt "the bardic and minstrel arts which were part of their racial heritage" to the formation of new ballads. In the coal camps the folks enjoyed invoking and sharing family versions of ballads. When mining companies industrialized the region, "singers reached into their repertoires for familiar tunes, and composed songs of resistance. […These songs] not only expressed frustration and despair, but hopes for decent wages and working conditions, articulating an emerging proletarian class consciousness." These new songs helped create "a shared identity of attitudes and values […] and fused an ideology of collective action to traditional cultural forms.
During the strike songs were often written as events were unfolding resulting in them being rough hewn and necessitating that they be sung to familiar tunes. For both writer and singer the strike songs provided an outlet for venting frustrations, a way to assert strength, and a sense of control over the situation. It is important to clarify that the miner's songs were not always "woeful, but labor strife is a category which takes an impressive place among his songs." As such, the United Mine Workers Journal, an important periodical in the lives of miners during the early 20th century, "has preserved more miners' protest and strike songs than any other agency […], but […] it is often impossible to tell whether a printed stanza is a poem or a song - or, if it was a song, whether it was actually sung."
The role of women in the mining community seems to have been one of strength for the male miners, especially during disasters and strikes, nursing sick and hungry children and injured men. They "directly and perpetually suffered the consequences of dangerous work conditions, paltry mine wages, and debt relationships with the company store." Sarah Gunning voiced this in her song "Come All You Coal Miners:"
I know how the coal miners work and slave in the coal mines every day,
For a dollar in the company store, for that is all they pay.
The women's day began before the men and children rose to prepare breakfast and pack the miner's lunch pail and ended after everyone went to sleep. Thus women often died before their men from illness or in childbirth. While they were often the ones writing the protest songs, they were not protesting their own conditions but those of the miners. The idea seems to have been that if the men could get better conditions and wages it would trickle down, as it were, to them, improving their lot. In a song called "Clara Sullivan's Letter," Malvina Reynolds expresses what seems to be a common ideology:
I'm twenty-six years a miner's wife,
There's nothing harder than a miner's life,
But there's no better man than a mining man,
Couldn't find better in all this land.
The deal they get is a rotten deal…
Romalis explains this phenomenon as "strategic and instrumental expressions of maternalist political discourses, rather than simply reflections of 'essential' womanhood. […] Many of their songs reflected a gender subtext: family or domestic concerns, responsibility, or relationship to others, the particular effect of poverty and powerlessness on them as women, and on their men, marriages, and children." These expressions were communal and universal among the women in the region. Their songs were their weapons.
Aunt Molly Jackson, born Mary Magdalene Garland in 1880, was one of the most colorful characters to ever come from Kentucky. She was strong-willed, proud, and not afraid of anything, except maybe being ignored. I do not want to talk too much about her because her life has been covered by many authors over time, but I will mention some of the events which occurred during one decade in her life. In 1931 she was invited to come and sing in New York City by the Dreiser Committee to raise money and awareness about the plight of miners in eastern Kentucky. She was an organizer for the NMU at the time and had been writing songs since, the story goes, she was four years old. She lived out the rest of the decade in the Lower East side of Manhattan. Her half-brother Jim Garland, who also composed songs about miners, lived with her during this time, bringing his wife and children. In 1936, Sarah Gunning, Jim's sister and Molly's half-sister moved in after she lost her husband to tuberculosis. In New York Molly was befriended by Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, a professor of English at New York University. In 1935 Barnicle brought 19 year old college student and "budding folklore collector," Alan Lomax, to Aunt Molly's apartment: "together they recorded a comprehensive singing biography that include 75 of Molly's songs. These would later prove a sore point for Molly and Sarah, too, who wasn't informed that the recordings would be donated to the Library of Congress without compensation for either of them." John Greenway, author of American Folksongs of Protest, also befriended Molly to learn her songs. He eventually became tired of her penchant for embellishing stories and claiming authorship of songs he knew she did not write, but "despite concluding that Molly was an unreliable informant, still thought her a 'great' one."
Sarah Garland Ogan Gunning was born in 1910 in Kentucky. Unlike her half-sister Molly, she shied away from the limelight. She was 26 when she moved to New York at Barnicle's urging. She had lost her husband and one child in Kentucky and her other child was sick with tuberculosis when she came to New York and later died. It was not until she moved away that she began to write songs. She wrote from personal experience, like many of the women in the coal camps, often urging miners to organize. Her most well known song, "Come All You Coal Miners," talks of her heartbreak over losing her children and husband in a way that makes it a shared communal experience. She was not the only one:
They take your very life blood, they take our children's lives,
They take fathers away from children, and husbands away from wives.
She lived in Detroit for a time, "Green found her [there in 1963] and returned with folklorist Ellen Stekert to persuade Sarah to record and perform." Organizers invited her to perform at northern folk music festivals, including Newport, during the commercial revival in the 1960s. "In a way," Romalis says, "the Newport experience for Sarah in the 1960s was like the Dreiser inquiry for Molly in the 1930s – a discovery, a chance for a new beginning, an appreciation of her Appalachian traditional ballads and style as well as her own compositions."
Florence Reece's story is not unlike Molly and Sarah's. Her husband joined the NMU in 1931 during the "Bloody Harlan" strike. One night a group of gun-thugs led by sheriff J.H. Blair came to her door looking for her husband. They stayed outside the house all night but he never came home. Reece knew she "'just had to do something to help,'" so she wrote a song. The song she wrote, "Which Side Are You On?" was written on the wall calendar because "'we didn't have any stationary cause we didn't get nothing, we was doing good to live.'" Her song addressed the split between the miners themselves:
They say in Harlan County
There are no neutrals there;
You'll either be a union man
Or a thug for J.H. Blair.
Which side are you on?
In a later interview she was quoted as saying: "I felt that with a song, or a story, or a poem, the troubles was a little easier." It seems that for the women the best weapon they had at their disposal was song.
The lone male songwriter I have chosen to talk about, Merle Travis, is a perfect figure to segue into the subject of commercially recording coalmining songs. Born in 1917 at Rosewood, Kentucky, his father was a tobacco farmer who made the move to coal mining when Travis was young, "a similar transition made by countless Americans during industrialization." Travis wrote "the most popular mining song ever," "Sixteen Tons." In the song he mentions the powerful pull of the mines for all young men growing up in coal country and the need to provide more income for the family:
I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
Picked up a shovel and I walked to the mine
The chorus of the song references the perpetual debt miners found themselves in in the company camps, although, by the time of the songs popularity "most people didn't know what a company store was:"
You haul Sixteen Tons, whadaya get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don't you call me cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
Beyond that the song adds to the stereotyped image of Appalachian men as lawless and quick to fight, but also the strength of the woman who lived along side them:
Born one morning it was drizzle and rain,
Fightin' and Trouble are my middle name
I was raised in a canebrake by an old mama lion
And no high-toned woman make me walk the line
See me comin' better step aside;
A lot of men didn't and a lot of men died.
I got one fist of iron and the other of steel
And if the right one don't get ya, the left one will.
Another popular song Travis penned is "Dark As A Dungeon." It has been sung by numerous artists, including Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton. This song, like "Sixteen Tons" references the lure of the mines, comparing it to a drug:
Come all you young fellows so young and so fine
And seek not your fortune in the dark dreary mine
It will form like a habit and seep in your soul
Till the stream of your blood runs as black as the coal
Chorus
Where it's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where the danger is doubled and the pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine
There's many a man I've seen in my day
Who lived just to labor his whole life away
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust for the lure of the mine.
Despite the somber tone of these two songs, and as something of an explanation for the likening of coal mining to addictive drugs, Travis explained "that miners frequently enjoy their work and take pride in it, although some people don't have a clue about that aspect of a miner's character."
The great debate over the authenticity of commercial recordings is exemplified in the case of "The Dream of the Miner's Child." The song was released in the US in 1925, and was the hillbilly genre's first substantial coal-song hit. It reached an extremely wide audience in a few years' time. "Some songs […] seem destined to trouble folklorists (but, happily, not the folk), Green says at the beginning of his chapter dedicated to this curious song: "'The Dream of the Miner's Child' was spread almost entirely by commercial records in the mid-1920s. Not only were these discs widely sold, thereby precluding anonymity or obscurity, but the 'Dream's' leading singer, Vernon Dalhart, met no scholar's criterion for a folksinger – then or now. Further, when the oracular song itself was studied, it led back to a music-hall piece flatly rejected as a folksong in England." Somehow though, the song became a popular folksong in the US.
The only folklorist to explore this song in US tradition was Wayland Hand. "During 1948 he found many Butte, Montana, residents who partly remembered it;" two men "dated the song back to the old country, Cornwall, about 1908. […Both recalled the song being] sung in theaters and pubs." The United Mine Workers Journal printed the song in 1911, Woody Guthrie recalled singing it when young in Oklahoma, Mary Elizabeth Barnicle "deposited two versions on Kentucky field discs at the Library of Congress in 1938," and Korson encountered the song numerous times in both anthracite and bituminous coal fields.
Current State
One final songwriter I want to mention is Hazel Dickens (born 1935 in West Virginia).
Although her songs come from her traditional Baptist past, they are centralized around liberation for women and labor activism. Her theme of women supporting themselves is a more recent turn in coal mining songs. Dickens has also given freely of her time to benefits, rallies, as well as to various films, where her powerful voice is capable of giving the viewer chills. She did much of the original music for the documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., and also for John Sayles' film, Matewan, in which she also appeared. She currently lives in Washington, D.C. and in July of 1996 was given a tribute by the Smithsonian Institutions' Festival of American Folk-life, honoring her for the love and support she has brought to bluegrass and "old-time" music.
Mine disasters are still happening, and often. Two tragic mining disasters occurred in West Virginia in January of this year: the explosion at the Sago Mine which killed 12, and the fire at the Alma Mine that killed two. While I have uncovered what appear to be poems about the disasters I have not found any new songs; which doe not mean there aren't any, I just haven't found them.
The popularity of the movie Coal Miner's Daughter (1980) and the recording titled Coal Mining Women (1997) help keep Appalachia and the coal mining industry in the public eye in a more pleasant if not positive way than disasters.
Government regulations regarding safety in the miners have dramatically curbed US mine deaths. There were nearly 3,000 deaths a year in the early 1900s and about 200 per year in 1969, last year the number of deaths in the mines dropped to 22. Which is good news since in many towns in Appalachia mining is still the only job in town.
Attention to industrial folksongs, the changing face of authenticity, the formation of an American identity, protest, and a little know body of songs are some of the subjects I hope I covered in a way that is suitably understandable to someone not familiar with the Appalachian region or its music. I wanted to explore how labor songs are and should be part of our collective history as a way to give a voice to those who are often voiceless in the face of corporate control or political agendas.
Works Cited
Batteau, Allen W. The Invention of Appalachia. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1990.
Carawan, Guy, and Candie Carawan, comp. Voices from the Mountains. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.
Glazer, Joe. Labor's Troubadour. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.
Green, Archie. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-mining Songs. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1972.
Greenway, John. American Folksongs of Protest. New York: Octagon, 1971.
Kirby, Rich, and Michael Kline. They Can't Put It Back. June Appal Recordings, 1977.
Korson, George. Coal Dust on the Fiddle. Hatboro: Folklore Associates, 1965.
---------------. Minstrels of the Mine Patch. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1938.
Lynch, Timothy P. Strike Songs of the Depression. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001.
Online NewsHour. 1 February 2006. PBS.org. 7 May 2006
Romalis, Shelly. Pistol Packin' Mama: Aunt Molly Jackson and the Politics of Folksong. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999.
Various Artists. Coal Mining Women. Rounder, 1997.
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