West Virginia Mine Disaster
West Virginia Mine Disaster
I’d like to devote a blog to the great Jean Ritchie original song “West Virginia Mine Disaster.”
I first heard Jean herself perform this song several years ago at a music festival where we were appearing together. It is sung a ccapella, and she did so, sitting in a chair under a tent with lots of folks listening. It was transformative for me. The story of a woman whose husband disappears into the mines one day never to return was one that hadn’t been told quite like that ever in my experience. And, true to Jean’s introduction of the song when she sings it, it hadn’t ever been written from that perspective before either ~ of the woman’s view of things when a tragic accident falls on a mining community.
Jean always says that when she ever heard of a story that didn’t have a song to go with it (as was always the case when she was growing up in Eastern Kentucky), she knew she had to write one.
So this is how Jean introduces the song and it’s now what I say to audiences of my own:
He passed all your houses on the way to the coal.
He was tall, he was slender, and his dark eyes so tender,
His occupation was mining, West Virginia his home.
It was just before twelve, I was feeding the children.
Ben Mosely came running to give us the news;
Number eight is all flooded, many men are in danger,
And we don’t know their number, but we fear they’re all doomed.
To comfort each other and pray for our own;
There’s Timmy, fourteen, and there’s John not much younger,
Their own time soon will be coming to go down the black hole.
The Jean Ritchie Tribute Project
Source: The Susie Glaze New Folk Ensemble Blog