Various Artists – Coal Mining Women
I have an old copy of a book called Hard Hitting Songs For Hard Hit People (now criminally out-of-print) that collects and comments on protest and blues songs of the 1930s. In it, Woody Guthrie quotes organizer and songwriter Aunt Molly Jackson: “I composed this song one morning a few months after the miners’ wages had been cut down so low that the children was a-starving like flies, and dying like flies. We had to put up a soup kitchen and make soup to try to save their lives. Some of them hadn’t had anything to eat for two days. This song came out of my head — not from the point of a pen.”
The mine is a myth of country music, great metaphor for deep fears, obsessions, damnations, even paradoxically for the womb, for that place dark, familiar, irresistible. But it’s first a fact: The country of country has long been pocked and stripped, fueled by coal. The families of Appalachia, whether miners or not, were shaped and scarred by the economy and culture of the mines.
This CD places that myth and fact under the burning focal light of women, specifically Sarah Gunning, Hazel Dickens, Phyllis Boyens and Florence Reece. Rounder chose to reissue tracks featuring women from They’ll Never Keep Us Down and Come All Ye Coal Miners, and added others to tell a story from the activist point of view of mothers, wives, and women working the coal.
The music is much more than agitation: The pickers are simply some of the foremost in acoustic, old-time music, including Jerry Douglas, Roy Huskey, Blaine Sprouse, Gary Henderson, Roland White, Bob Siggins and Bela Fleck. The pathos of Hazel Dickens’ “Coal Miner’s Grave” is overwhelming, while on “Coal Tattoo”, her band drives like a runaway truck. More surprising is Phyllis Boyens: With limited range, but with unveiled vibrato, she phrases each line of Si Kahn’s “Lawrence Jones” and lays bare a quiet urgency, as though the lyrics were unlearned and just appearing to her mind. Sarah Gunning’s a cappella stories of broadside realism (including her “Come All Ye Coal Miners”, covered by Uncle Tupelo) have an equally intense artlessness that is, like the whole of this reissue/compilation, moving and radical — and artful in spite of itself.