DISSIDENT ARTS: Listen

• MP3 play whole song, hi-fi (broadband)

While most recall this song as a pop hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford, Travis wrote it in memory of his own father, a coal miner, and others in his home town. The miners struggle for union representation went on for decades and included brutal battles in which scores of miners and their families were killed by armies for hire and corrupt deputies, all in the pocket of the mine owners. In most cases, poor workers not only slaved in the mines 12-18 hours per day, but they did so decades before OSHA existed. Worse, they usually lived on the mine-owners property, far from town, and so needed to shop at the Company Store which usually over-charged for everything and gave back 'scrip' as change---of no monetary value in any other establishment. It was standard for the miners to be in so debt to the mine-owner that they tended to bring home nearly nothing from their already meager wages. IN this regard, they became indentured servants. Genrally, the coal miners could not afford to buy coal for their fragile, near-stared families' hillside, rural shacks. The atrocity was only overshadowed by the irony.

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Our version of the song, found on our second disc REVENGE OF THE ATOM SPIES, keeps the original intent in mind while allowing for a modernization of the sound through a pronounced anger, increasingly present as the song builds.