CD - Coal mine echoes from Bucky Halker

We spend half our day working – yet our music is about love, lost and found.  Where are the songs about working?

For sheer volume, there are more songs about coal mining than any other job.  Facing tragedy, danger and exploitative coal operators, miners united and lifted their spirits through song.  Early miners’ union magazines are replete with worker poems miners penned.

Chicago’s Bucky Halker, a talented musician, along with a PhD in 19th century worker music, recently compiled a sample of these songs in Coal, singing those songs solo with his own accompaniment.

The songs range from the slightly humorous to the tragic.  Two Illinois mining disasters are referenced. In Fatal Cherry Mine, is a poem that became a song about the November 13, 1909, Cherry Mine disaster that caused 259 deaths.  An incredibly touching song is Woody Guthrie’s The Dying Miner, about the March 25, 1947, Centralia mine explosion that took 111 lives.  Guthrie based his lyrics on notes the miners wrote as they were trapped underground.

I can hear the moans and groans,
More than a hundred good men.
Just work and fight and try to see,
That this never happens again.

Virden is based on a poem after the 1897 shoot-out between company guards and miners in Virden, that left seven miners dead.

Not all the songs are traditional.  In 2023, Arvel Dean Smothers, an 80-year-old miner in West Frankfort shared a poem with Halker, who put it to music as Coal Minin’, a very apt description of a miner’s life, with energetic chords from Halker.

There are familiar songs here.  In 1947 while in sunny California, Merle Travis wrote a ballad which quickly became a classic, Dark as a Dungeon.  Many union rallies feature Which Side are you on? written by miner’s wife Florence Reece, during the 1931 coal wars in Harlan County, Kentucky.  Another evocative song, often sang as a round, is Step by Step, with possible roots in the 1830s-1840s British Chartist movement, which sought land reform and voting rights.  The American Miners Association was formed in Belleville, Illinois in 1861 and this became their anthem, still haunting and promising victory through persistent effort.

A humorous touch comes with Blue Monday, a 1901 lament by Michael Barry, an Illinois miner reflecting on Monday morning’s pain after a Sunday evening drinking. Barry later operated a saloon in Girard, Illinois. 

George Korson was a famous folklorist who roamed mining camps in the 1930s-1940s, seeking workers’ music, poems and jokes. From his explorations came The Coal Loading Machine and Sprinkle Coal Dust on my Grave. 

There are 15 pieces in this CD, all ably performed by Halker with great spirit and musical skill. 

The album is available as a download for $12, a CD for $15 from https://shorturl.at/sbEDF