Voices From the Mines
"I went out to my well. For the last week or so I was getting less and less water out of my well. Well, I just stuck my head in the well head and wondered, and then I just hollered down that well,'WHERE IS ALL MY WATER?' Well, a voice came back from down below,'It's all down in this mine!!!'"
Voices from the mines. Here are stories I have heard from coal miners and friends over the course of 30 years doing music in eastern Kentucky schools and nursing homes.
"We were trapped in a mine. There was a bunch of us. And we had a rock fall. Hard to tell how long we were trapped. It seemed like days. And we were running out of air. We knew they were looking for us but we didn't hear a thing of them. We wandered a ways back in that mine and I'll be dang if we didn't hear footsteps on the mountain above us. We started hollering as hard as we could and tapping on the ceiling of the mine. It was somebody gensinging on the mountain above us. He beat on the ground with his gensing hoe and ran to get help. They dug us out. Next Monday morning we were back working underground."
"I ran a dump truck for mountain top removal mines. My job was to take the overburden from the mining operation and dump it in the valley. They called it valley fill. I had to take it and dump it over the edge. Well sir, that dump had to go plumb over the edge. You couldn't just dump it in a pile next to the edge. If you did that, they would have to hire a bull dozer to push it over and that would cost them more money. You would get fired if you left a pile on top. It had to go over the edge into the valley below.....and I mean way below. So, what I had to do was to back the truck up until I felt the back tires sink in the soft dirt at the edge, then dump it. All day.....back up until the tires sank at the edge.....dump..... Well, sir, I worked night shifts, too....many a foggy night.....I couldn't see s..t. I didn't know where I was backing....was I getting straight to the edge or what? So, I took a can of flourescent green spray paint and put an X on the face of the rock wall opposite the dump site. I'd shine my lights on that X and back until I felt my back tires sink at the edge. Then dump. I came home with a splitting headache every night. Now, you try to go home every night and try not to tell your wife the kind of night you had at work."
"I ran a dozer for a strip mine. Dangerous work. All that dozing at the edges...dangerous, 'cause you couldn't tell at times how stable the ground was. Well, I was doing work on an edge and I ran into some kind of soft fault in the rock.....and over I went...over and over...it really messed up my back and I have suffered from it ever since.....can't hardly get any relief. Ever since that day I never heard a word from the company."
"I loved mining...especially when we were running coal....when everything was running right, no breakdowns....and we were running a lot of coal...those were good days. You go in a mine and you run into fossils millions of years old. It's like you are walking where no one else has trod....millions of years of the earth's history. In the mines it was always the same temperature, summer or winter. I loved the guys in the mines. We really loved each other. Our lives depended on each other. It was a bond we kept for all our days."
"I worked in some mighty low mines- thirty inch coal. I could bend my self into a tri-fold wallet. I'd work until the coal worked out and then I would go into the hills and look for gensing. Then another mine would open up and I'd work there. In the mountian, or on the mountain....I knew what to do to survive."
A mine rep at the Black Gold Festival said, "Oh, miners don't have to get black lung. They have masks." I talked to miners. "You can't wear a mask in a mine. That thing will clog up in a matter of minutes. And you get so hot and sweaty with them on. You can't get any work done with a mask."
"I watched my dad. He worked in a mine. He got that blacklung. It got so he couldn't walk to the mailbox without coughing up blood. So, when I went into the mines I worked on the idle shift. That is, I worked on the machines when we weren't running coal. When you are running coal you are stirring up a lot of coal dust and rock dust.
Well, I'd try to talk to the young guys just starting out underground. They would want to impress the supervisor. And if the supervisor asked them to go do something under unsupported top, well, some of them would do it. I'd say to them, 'Git some grit in your craw and say NO.' But they needed the job bad....and some of them got killed.
Well, they needed me to work on the machines to keep the operation going. So, I could say most anything. We were having this meeting and had to fill out a evaluation form on our supervisor. It was mostly "rah-rah" stuff, you know. Well, after a bit I lifted my hand and they asked what it was and I looked down at my the form with pencil in hand and asked, ' Is cocksucker one word or two?'"
"I don't know how long I tried to get my black lung benefits. I went to doctor after doctor. I took fomrs to the black lung office in Pikeville. I could not get a thing done. One day I went into that office and just hollered, 'You all just go home. Everyone one of you. Ain't no such thing as black lung!"
"You can't take a banjo down in a mine!"
"I got a half hour for lunch don't I?"
"Well, yeah."
" Then I'll take it down with me for lunch."
" I was laying in bed and the deputy sheriff came in the house and pointed a 45 at my head and says, 'You're coming with us.' We were in a strike down at the mines and a feller got shot and killed over it. They were rounding up all the striking miners. They ran out of room at the Hazard jail. So they took me and others over to Hyden. The union was good to us while we were in jail. They made sure we got plenty to eat and checked on us. Someone brought me a banjo and I started playing it in the jailhouse. Pretty soon there were people coming to the jailhouse to hear the music. Some big shot lumber operator came to the jailhouse. I remember him because he had rusty ankles- kinda dirty ankles. But they acted like he owned the town. Anyway, he had a long overcoat on...and those rusty ankles. So he opened up his overcoat and there was a fifth of liquor and he says,'Just take what you want, Lee.' So I did. We had the biggest time you ever saw in that jailhouse. I went in there with 5 dollars and left with $150 and six cartons of cigarettes."
Below is a medley of mining songs by Merle Travis, Jean Ritchie, and Mike Paxton. Included are pics of miners in different eras of coal mining in Appalachia.
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