Fire in the Hole! - Part Two

An essay on/playlist of coal mining songs

* See the introductory Part One here

The King of Mining Songs

Legend has it Merle Travis¹ wrote both ‘Sixteen Tons’ and ‘Dark as a Dungeon’ in a single night. The night before a recording session! Music lore is notoriously unreliable, but if it’s true, it was the most gloriously productive one-night compositional evening until Dolly Parton apparently knocked off ‘Jolene’ and ‘I Will Always Love You’ in the same writing session. Both Travis pieces are masterpieces of American song.

He was a native of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, once prime mining country. He got ‘Sixteen Tons’ chorus from a childhood memory of his miner Daddy telling neighbours, when asked how he was doing, “I can’t afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store.” Imagine being a kid and hearing your dad say that, for Christ’s sake.

The company store. What a neatly vile trick this piece of capitalist innovation that was. Set up business in a remote rural location where both commerce and rival employers are rare. Coal mining is ideal. Sweat your workers, work them to death. And coin in gargantuan profits. But there’s still more to squeeze. ‘Cos if you can exploit the fact that shops are scarce by establishing your own store, then most of the same meagre wages you chuck your workers will come back to you! They often even paid in their own currency – ‘scrip’ – just to be sure the pay was no good elsewhere. It certainly wasn’t a purely American phenomenon: Zola had some suitably harsh words for it too.

Here’s Travis in ‘Sixteen Tons’:

You load sixteen tons and what do you get?
You get another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me, ‘cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store

The irony of the Feds apparently going round telling radio stations to avoid such dangerous commie stuff lies in the fact that Travis was not exactly a leftie.² And yet I consider this as brilliant and perfect a chorus as American protest song has ever produced.³ The song’s sinisterly loping gait is dead-on, and aside from that imperishable chorus, Travis’ turn of phrase is highly skilled. “Some people say a man is made outta mud / A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood”. I’d kill to write a couplet as good as that.

‘Dark as a Dungeon,’ meanwhile, is a warning, and a bleak one. It’s actually a little perverse: Travis speaks of mining less as something a man is compelled to do by dint of geography and class than as the addiction of a junkie. “Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard with his wine / A man will have lust for the lure of the mine”.

Travis was so renowned for mining songs that Johnny Cash commissioned him for a new one for 1960’s Ride This Train. ‘Loading Coal’ is a curious article, with Cash’s spoken word introduction attempting the connection of Native American and mining strife. This time, Travis does express the fate of mining as circumstantial life sentence:

I cussed everything in the mining camp
From a shovel and my pick to my carbide lamp
But I know mighty well ‘til I grow old
I’ll still be a cussin’ but loadin’ coal

Tellingly – hello Feds – the song places little to no faith in the merits of labour organising.

I know just as well as coal is black
One of these days the mines were strike
And I’ll sit around starvin’ till I’m finally told
There’s a nickel more a ton for loadin’ coal

Travis’ Kentucky descendants

In a previous piece, I imagined a knockout ‘Battle of the Musical States’ tournament. I didn’t at the time, but let me nail my colours to the mast now: I’m rooting either for Texas or Kentucky. There’s just something about that Appalachian sensibility, rooted in its migratory history, its defiance, its resistance to the frequent caricaturing of outsiders. And if, to the foreigner, the perception of Texans is that their credo is ‘Thank God I was born a Texan!’, then the sense one gets from the music of the Bluegrass State is rather more ‘It’s great, but damned hard being from Kentucky’. Fair to say there were vastly superior and more generous Kentucky elegies aplenty before that degenerate asshole cashed in.

Sturgill Simpson, for example, is as brilliant and quixotic an artist as contemporary roots music has to offer. Originally a Kentucky bluegrass boy, he’s taken his gloriously unpredictable vision in all manner of sonic directions. Right now, preferring the moniker Johnny Blue Skies, the muse is all ‘70s soul and yacht rock-shaped.

‘Old King Coal’ dates as far back as his self-disowned, Waylon Jennings-aping High Top Mountain, but listen instead to the remake on Simpson’s brilliant double-album bluegrass reimagining of old songs, Cuttin’ Grass.

This is a song which strikes at the duality of a mining community’s relationship with those dark dungeons. For the same thing which causes so much hardship and misery – so much death – is also not only the sole means of economic survival, it’s identity. Simpson’s is an elegy for a way of life; for a people stripped – pun intended – of their very self.

Many a man down in these here hills
Made a living off that old black gold
Now there ain’t nothing but welfare and pills
And the wind never felt so cold

The reference to pills reflects the tragic reality that drugs have proliferated wildly in former mining communities.

Like me, Simpson’s great-granddaddy was a miner, and Sturgill knows that he himself will be one of the first of his tribe in a good while not to succumb to a work-induced early death. There’s perhaps even a little guilt in his observation that “my death will be slower than the rest of my kind”. And yet, despite these advantages, “my life will be sadder than the songs they all sung”.

Without being remotely nostalgic, it’s a song which is explicit in rejecting the Pinkerian notion that we are on an ever-upward arc of life quality. The end of mining brought the end of miners’ physical suffering. But it’s way worse now. Great-grandaddy’s in heaven, but “… down here in hell / The rivers run muddy and the mountains are bare”. There’s also an interesting little dig at carpet-bagging progressives.

In a similarly funereal vein is Steve Earle’s ‘The Mountain’, given its best reading by the great Levon Helm. Among the many things I find unfathomable about the actual daily business of the miner is the darkness. Earle puts it with useful simplicity: “you rose in the mornin’ before it was light / To go down in that dark hole and come back up at night”. These are men living like moles. (Zola was a little more darkly poetic, thinking that in such darkness men withered “like vegetables in a cellar”.)

From another Kentucky boy, Simpson’s protégé Tyler Childers’ ‘Coal’ is quite as pissed at God as it as at the company.

And in my darkest hour
I cry out to the Lord
He says, “Keep on minin’, boy
‘Cause that’s why you were born⁴

The sense of an inescapable fate is a recurring theme.

In contrast, another Kentuckian, Dwight Yoakam’s ‘Miner’s Prayer’, from his stellar debut, Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc, puts full faith in the almighty, presumably since no other options prevail. I’m with Childers, though. I don’t believe in heaven so, camels and eyes of the needle notwithstanding, I have no faith Yoakam’s poor sod received his beautiful reward. Yoakam’s affirmation of the miner’s unstrippable dignity moves me though:

I have no shame, I feel no sorrow
If on this earth not much I own
I have the love of my sweet children
An old plow mule, a shovel and a hoe

Songs for Stripping

Not content with mutilating human beings, the most aggressive mining practices deform the earth as well. Strip mining and mountaintop removal are exactly as they sound and form the central lament of several fine songs.

The best is the great John Prine’s ‘Paradise’, from his first, self-titled, album, one of the very finest debut records of all time. Prine’s people were from Merle Travis’ Muhlenberg County, but moved north to Chicago, where Prine grew up. They’d go back in summer, indelibly precious and formative experiences for the young Prine. Singing as his child self, he begs “Daddy, won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County? / Down by the Green River where Paradise lay”. To which Daddy replies, forlornly, “Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking / Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away”.

After the company had stripped it bare, Paradise became a ghost town. It was disincorporated and the final residents forced out in ‘67.⁵ Prine wasn’t done with it though. When he died tragically of Covid in the early days of the pandemic, the song’s wish that “When I die, let my ashes float down the Green River / Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester Dam” was honoured.

The West Virginian Charles Wesley Godwin is a singer I’ve never been as giddy about as others. Nor is his ‘Coal Country’ an especially good song – its arrangement is far too jaunty for a tale as desperate as the one Godwin wants to tell, for a start. But there are some lyrical touches deserving of mention. Like Sturgill, he’s lamenting a lost way of life. His home area is all “closed-up towns, forgotten dreams, and welcome signs / Fading far behind.”

Now we don’t need tokens to a company store
That’s what government stamps and codeine’s for
We may have won a few battles but we lost the war
Now we’re slaves and poor
Coal Country

Note the drugs, again. And the slaves line is rather daring for an American white man, no? But he’s certainly right that one form of serfdom has been swapped for another, one lacking the dignity that comes with employment and utility, however awful.

The line that hits hardest for me, though, is his assertion that as well as powering American prosperity from the “western skies to Washington D.C”, it was his kin put “the armour on the tanks in Normandy”.

I don’t know if Godwin is consciously channelling Springsteen (though which sensitively masculine heartland troubadour is not?) But it’s Springsteen’s brilliant ‘Youngstown’ this echoes. 1995’s The Ghost of Tom Joad is a record long overdue for a proper re-appreciation. With Nebraska and Devils and Dust, it was an excellent middle part to a Guthrie-esque, Steinbeckian acoustic trilogy.

‘Youngstown’ is the tale of an Ohio steel town in sharp ‘70s decline, and Springsteen’s career-long obsession with the virtually unacknowledged contribution of the American working man to American war is on full display.

Well my daddy come on the Ohio works when he come home from World War Two
Now the yard’s just scrap and rubble, he said ‘Them big boys did what Hitler couldn’t do.’
Yeah these mills they built the tanks and bombs that won this country’s wars
We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam, now we’re wondering what they were dying for

And the reason Springsteen is a bona fide genius – one of the greatest living American songwriters no less!!! – while most others in this piece are mere prodigious talents, lies in his ability to fully encapsulate entire lives and entire socio-political realities in a single, perfect lyrical proposition. “Once I made you rich enough / Rich enough to forget my name” is better, angrier, and truer than any line in any song by more explicitly ‘political’ writers on the same theme. And if the addressee is the Youngstown steel mill boss, then it is also an entire American way of life; America itself. For, in the grand scheme, it is not only corporations who have treated generations of men as they would a Kleenex – as a utilitarian object to be thrown away once useless, soiled, and distasteful – but entire nations.

On the theme of disposability, Ted Chestnut’s ‘Only a Miner Killed in the Ground’, an early country folk recording from 1928, puts the ugly reality aptly. Noughties hipsters The Decembrists do similarly on ‘Rox in the Box’, a near century later: “there’s plenty of men to die / don’t jump your turn,” the miner is told.

That old black lung

Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis. Black lung to you and me, and to the tens of thousands of miners struck down by it. No cure, and no mitigation this side of an oxygen tank.

When coal and silica get into the lungs, the organ works as hard as a miner to expel them. Over time, this pulmonary exertion results in scar tissue. And lungs don’t like scar tissue.

So many songs reference the miner’s plague. Start with the great Hazel Dickens’ a cappella reading of ‘Black Lung’ and go from there.

James Talley was one of ‘70s alt-Nashville’s great forgotten talents. A favourite of President and especially Mrs Carter, he made a quadrilogy of great records from ‘75 to ‘78 before dropping out for a decade to sell Nashville real estate – go figure. His fusion of western swing, honky-tonk, and folk served a definitely left-populist lyrical sensibility: depression-era postcards for the post-oil crisis ‘70s downturn. ‘Got No Bread, No Milk, No Money, But We Sure Got a Lot of Love’ and ‘Are They Gonna Make Us Outlaws Again?’ are ought-to-be-classics.

The definitive version of his devastating black lung tale, ‘Give My Love to Marie’, was cut by Gene Clark for Two Sides to Every Story, Clark’s first go back in the saddle after David Geffen stiffed him – and the listening public – with No Other.

Our East Tennessee narrator is dying when we meet him, looking back over a quarter century digging the black jewel (from which fact we can reasonably conclude he is no age at all). He’s pondering the fate of Marie and his six boys after he’s gone. There’ll be no money: in the ‘70s the mining lawyers used to claim there was no link between black lung and mining; stop me if you’ve heard this story before.

It’s a truly hopeless song. All the dying miner wishes are two things: that his boys not end up in the mine, condemned to mirror his early death, their last days spent gasping for air; and the liberation of his own death. Since we can’t much help him with either, he begs only, on each chorus, for us to “Hang my [miners] lantern in the window / Give my love to Marie”.

There’s even some suggestion that incidences of black lung actually increase the further technology advances: the greater the amount of earth shifted and disturbed, the greater the dust and silica. Hence perhaps why cases of black lung are on the rise, despite the general decline in American coal. Trumpian deregulation will doubtless see them rise further.⁶

And so black lung songs continue. Two wonderful daughters of Kentucky – collectively The Local Honeys – brought us the stomping, bass and banjo-driven ‘Dying to Make a Living’. The song benefits from its technique of humble reportage. As well as fucked lungs, our boy’s got a pinched nerve in his neck, a metal spine, three slipped discs, a bone from his hip in his lower back, and screws in both legs. The moral outrage lies, gently, in the punning title and central refrain. In the should-be-obvious fact that the necessity of earning a crust ought not to mean a death sentence.

You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive

If American pop-culture mining iconography lives in any one location, then Harlan County is surely it. From my voyeur’s distance, I’m moderately obsessed with those deep, dark hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky. Again, it’s more than a little perverse: your pampered correspondent can go hang with Raylan Givens for a few hours and be utterly entranced by a hard life he will never have to contemplate further. Or, if he wants to feel virtuous, he can watch Barbara Kopple’s truly astonishing documentary of the 1973 Brookside Strike, Harlan County, USA. I beg the forgiveness of Harlan’s much-tried people for this digitised tourism.

Harlan songs are even tougher than most Kentucky tales, and for good reason. By the most recent data, the median household income in the county stood at just over $41,000. The national average is nearly $84,000. The percentage of people in poverty stood at over 29%, against a national average of just over 10%.⁷ The male life expectancy stands at 68.5. The national average is 76.7.⁸ Male life expectancy in Harlan County is on a par with Cambodia and Venezuela. No wonder meth is so popular.

Let’s start at the top. Darrell Scott’s ‘You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive’ is not only the best song about the county, it’s one of the finest contemporary country-bluegrass songs full stop. It was given stellar treatment and greater renown by a Kentucky black lung victim miner’s daughter, one of the greatest, most currently-neglected of country singers: Patty Loveless.⁹ But, as is my way, I like Scott’s version(s) best.

Harlan,

Where the sun comes up about ten in the morning
And the sun goes down about three in the day
And you fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you’re drinking
And you spend your life just thinking how to get away

Harlan, where carpet-bagging Yankee speculators abound. “Waving hundred-dollar bills, he said ‘I’ll pay you for your minerals’.” But the bastard never left Harlan alive.

Grandad tries to escape the life. He makes it out, all the way west of Pineville. But tobacco doesn’t sell. Back to Harlan, back to the mine, meagre money sent back to Granny. And he never again makes it out alive. A great song.

The brilliant Gary Stewart was yet another Kentucky talent. The family decamped to the warmer climes of Florida on account of his miner daddy’s workplace injury. Stewart pays tribute on the uncharacteristically minor-key mournful ‘Harlan County Highway’, where the son prefers running moonshine to mining. (Harlan is a ‘dry country’, the subject of Loudon Wainwright’s 2014 lament.)

Certainly the funkiest song in my selection is Kentuckian Jim Ford’s ‘Harlan County’, the title track of his 1969 southern soul cult classic. A sometime squeeze of Bobbie Gentry, a long-time partner in hellraising with Bobby Womack, and one of the single biggest influences on the great Nick Lowe, Ford’s was a bizarre career. A mega-talent and a mega-eccentric.

A tender paean to a beloved homeland ‘Harlan County’ ain’t. To a musical bed of pure Muscle Shoals, Ford proclaims,

Born into poverty, bathed in misery
The times I went hungry you can’t count ‘em
Where the cold winds blow and the crops don’t grow
A man’s tired of livin’ when he’s twenty
I was diggin’ hard coal at twelve years old
Way down in Harlan County

Daddy gets shot down cheating at poker. Momma marries the saintly Willie, “with the heart of a lion and the soul of a man”. Willie works like a dog, “Forty days ever’ month / Diggin’ for a bone in a hillside.” God Ford was good.

And a quick mention for kickass country supergroup Pistol Annies, who make a Christmas song of Harlan County misery. “Making decorations out of shotgun shells,” and all the kids get from Santa is a lump of Harlan County coal.

Down with the blackleg!

Harlan has also been the locus for some of the most bloody and controversial mining-industrial disputes in American labour history. Harlan County, USA is truly, jaw-droppingly spectacular. As evidence of the pain, tumult, and division caused by enforced (note the adverb) industrial action from a group of people out-financed, out-powered, and in this case literally outgunned, it has few peers. The traditional ‘Oh Death’ – always chilling – has never sounded as potent as when sung by Harlan miner/folksinger Nimrod Workman in the film.¹⁰

The ‘73 strike had casualties but was peaceful compared to the so-called Harlan County War of the ‘30s, with its near score of confirmed deaths. Out of that darkness and rage came the Harlan folksingers Florence Reece and Aunt Molly Jackson, two women of typically formidable strength.

Reece’s father had died in the Harlan mines, and her husband would later succumb to black lung. A stalwart union man, Sam Reece was out the night the company-supporting sheriff and his posse came calling in the ‘30s. Florence and her seven kids survived the ordeal, and as soon as the law had left she sat straight down and penned ‘Which Side Are You On?’ in a state of biblical fury.

I would contend that every song in this piece is a ‘protest song’. And it’s no slight to say that the swathes of more explicitly ‘political’ mining/union songs suffer from a lack of variety. Owners and bosses: bad and cruel. Blacklegs and scabs: bad and treacherous. Unions: (generally) good and essential.

Guthrie wrote plenty, but they aren’t his best, in my view.

Billy Bragg’s ‘A Miner’s Life’, is the kind of worthy doggerel he could write in his sleep, though his ‘Power in a Union’ is rousingly… well, powerful.

For sheer beauty, Kate Rusby’s rendition of ‘Coal Not Dole’ – a poem penned by Kay Sutcliffe, the wife of a striking Kentish miner in the early ‘80s – takes the crown.

The traditional ‘Coalminers’, memorably interpreted by Uncle Tupelo on their classic but unmemorably-named album March 16–20, 1992, has real novelty in protesting not merely capitalist excess, but the whole “dirty capitalist system”. From the same record, Jay Farrar’s mining original, ‘Shaky Ground’, is also great, and a reminder of why Farrar is one of my favourite singers.

Thanks, farewell, and victory to the miners.

Oh, and I forgot Loretta’s ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’. Oops.

The ‘Fire in the Hole!’ playlist is available at Tidal and Spotify.

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Footnotes (for the uber-nerds; they won’t be on the test)

1. Travis is an insufficiently heralded American master. Everyone has heard his impact, even if they haven’t heard him, courtesy of ‘Travis picking’.

2. Once Tennessee Ernie Ford hit big with the song, the Feds were pissing in the wind anyway.

3. A notable distinction between mining songs from the US and those from the UK: in the UK, they are always by explicit left-wingers; in the US, not so much.

4. Tellingly, on ‘I Swear (To God)’, the now sober Childers also turned to mining imagery to best describe his dissolute state when using or on the sauce. “Big Sandy rock, Sludge River roll / Goddamn! Fire in the hole! / I’m bound to blow a gasket”.

5. There’s a brilliantly ‘60s headline combo from the Iowan Telegraph Herald of December 29, 1967. “Paradise is Dead; Devil is Blamed’ sits just above “Sex Instructor Is Iowa’s Top ‘68 Teacher”; which itself sits just above news that the son of Mrs Jacqueline Day of Des Moines has been wounded in Vietnam.

6. Via the I Newspaper: “A drive by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has seen the closure of numerous offices occupied by the Mine Safety and Health Administration, an agency responsible for enforcing safety laws. Also cut were staff at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who monitored the health of miners, including checking for black lung.”

7. See https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/harlancountykentucky/PST045224

8. See https://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/county_profiles/US/2015/County_Report_Harlan_County_Kentucky.pdf

9. If you’re craving a heart-warming hug in these dark days, check out this video. Loveless, for various reasons, hasn’t been performing much and her days of genuine chart success date back to the Clinton administration. The joy and humility on her face when Kentucky country megastar Chris Stapleton brings her out to play in 2022 is deeply moving.

10. The video shown is shot later, by Alan Lomax.