Twice in recent weeks I’ve delved into Hazel Dickens’s work to find songs that walk the line between life and death in America’s coal fields. “Black Lung” is no murder ballad, but we saw how it used Primitive Baptist singing and a narrative structure similar to some cautionary murder ballads to achieve its powerful effect. “The Yablonski Murder” is a rough narrative that shares the news of a homicide proper, but the song is really more about corruption and reform in the UMWA and so it lacks the sharp edge we’ve come to know so well in this blog. Both songs though, and one more of Dickens’ that we’ll see today, have taproots in a labor song tradition that was influenced in no small way by Appalachian murder balladry.

Today’s post then is about that tradition of labor songwriting in America’s coal country. It’s a brief look at a few key examples and is certainly not comprehensive. However, it’s enough to illuminate the deeper connection between traditional balladry and the labor songs from the coal fields that remind us, like some murder ballads, that the blood of innocents is the price of greed.

“They say in Harlan County, there is no neutral there.”

“Which Side Are You On” is the perfect place to start to make today’s larger point. Why? First, it’s among the most popular of labor songs from the early 20th century and it’s specifically from the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, which is ground zero for today’s post. As well, the debate about the song’s melodic origin shows us the broader context of the Appalachian music which provided its ‘DNA’, and that of all the songs we’ll hear today. Finally, though “Which Side…” is not precisely a murder ballad, it nonetheless illustrates the key lyrical component that these songs share with our genre of choice; an absolute intensity that leaves the listener with no doubt as to what was at stake in the coal fields – life and death.

“Which Side Are You On” by Florence Reece – Lyrics

Florence Reece wrote the song in 1931, in the midst of Bloody Harlan, or The Harlan County War. Coal mining was outrageously hard and dangerous work, and the operators did nothing to make the mines safer. Pay was already below a subsistence level and was usually issued as scrip redeemable only at the company store, where the company set prices that were often two and three times higher than those in conventional stores. After the coal operators thereabouts cut miners’ pay by 10% to save costs and allow them to sell their coal more cheaply on the Depression-era national market, the United Mine Workers union attempted to organize the fields and give the hard-pressed miners a voice. Miners were indeed ready to fight; but met with red baiting, black listing, evictions, and all sorts of violence including murder, eventually the UMW pulled out. The communist-led National Miners Union moved in to attempt the same feat but met with even more intense resistance on the part of the coal operators and the local authorities which they all but totally controlled. Any miner suspected of union activity was “in the air and sun” – evicted from the company shacks and unable to find work in any mine – and leaders became targets for arrest, beating and assassination.

“Sheriff J.H. Blair and his men came to our house in search of Sam – that’s my husband – he was one of the union leaders. I was home alone with our seven children. They ransacked the whole house and then kept watch outside, waiting to shoot Sam down when he came back. But he didn’t come home that night. Afterward I tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall and wrote the words to “Which Side Are You On?” to an old Baptist hymn, “Lay the Lily Low”. My songs always goes to the underdog – to the worker. I’m one of them and I feel like I’ve got to be with them. There’s no such thing as neutral. You have to be on one side or the other. Some people say, “I don’t take sides – I’m neutral.” There’s no such thing. In your mind you’re on one side or the other. In Harlan County there wasn’t no neutral. If you wasn’t a gun thug, you was a union man. You had to be. – Florence Reece, in Voices From the Mountains

Reece’s song is terribly sad and clearly “goes to the underdog” as she said, and both are typical features of Appalachian ballads generally. The British ballads that survived in the hills and hollows of the American southeast celebrated many sorts of underdogs, even if many were of the gentle class. Home grown Appalachian ballads as well, both African-American and Anglo-American, were widespread in the mountains by the 1930’s and often featured various “underdogs” as their protagonists. We’ve seen many songs from both groups here as they are often tragic and quite violent murder ballads proper.

Reece claimed several times that the tune for “Which Side…” is an old Baptist hymn, the name of which she sometimes remembered as “Lay the Lily Low.” Hymns providing the melodic and lyric building blocks for Appalachian murder ballads is also something we’ve seen more than once in this blog, so this is no surprise. However, no hymn with that name is easily found in the typical sources. Archie Green suspected that Reece’s tune actually derived from the late 18th / early 19th century British ballad “Jack Munroe” (Laws N7) that was well known by many names in the Appalachians and often included a refrain like “lay the lily low” or something similar. Here is a field recording from the Blue Ridge Mountains on Spotify, sung by Sarah Hawkes. The refrain “ho Lilly ho” is almost a perfect melodic match to “Which Side Are You On?”

Beyond a folklorist’s understandable interest in provenance, it doesn’t really matter which tune Reece specifically used as her template. The point here, and concerning all of the songs we’ll hear below, is what Timothy P. Lynch argues in his Strike Songs of the Depression. “…[B]y utilizing traditional mountain melodies and religious hymns, the songs verbalized the workers’ thoughts and feelings in an idiom deeply rooted in their own culture, helping legitimize their claim to justice.” I would add only that part of that idiom, the murder ballad, gave these labor songs an edge that helped them do the job they were meant to do – to shock the listener into a deeper understanding of the political and economic situation the miners and their families faced.

Murder ballads of the American southeast, whether descended from Britain or homegrown by white and black balladeers, often achieve their desired effect by exposing the listener to violent imagery and shocking context. Our regular readers and the rest of you who are good and folked up know what I’m talking about, but I’d be happy to cite and discuss examples in the comments below. Usually tragic, sometimes cautionary, and occasionally even celebratory of an outlaw, these diverse tales almost all rely on potent doses of harsh reality to get their points across. If you read the lyrics to “Which Side…”, or any of those below, you can see the same dynamic.

The traditional murder ballad was so interwoven in the idiom of mountain music that its patterns are common in this later Appalachian labor songwriting tradition. But don’t misunderstand me – that ‘harsh reality’ was not a conscious, creative literary device. It was a direct reflection of life and death in the mountains and in the coal camps.

“In the early thirties I had one of my babies starve to death. It literally happened – people starved to death. Not only my own baby, but the neighbors’ babies. You seed them starve to death too. And all you could do was go over and help wash and dress ’em and lay ’em out and sit with the mothers until they could put ’em away.” Sarah Ogan Gunning, in Voices From the Mountains

“If I get killed by the gun thugs, please don’t grieve over me.”

A trio of Kentucky siblings provided the striking Harlan miners, as well as the labor movement and its allies in the decades following The Depression, a number of songs to help further the cause. Aunt Molly Jackson and her younger half-siblings Jim Garland and Sarah Ogan Gunning all composed labor anthems that rank among the most influential of their type ever written. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger both looked to them and their songs as models and inspiration.

The three were children of Oliver Garland, a coal miner, Baptist preacher, and “strong union man” as his daughter Mary (“Aunt Molly”) put it. Timothy Lynch summed up Oliver’s influence on Mary’s upbringing, and no doubt all of his children, “…[H]er fundamentalist religion and her efforts for social and economic justice were intertwined.” The black and white of sin and salvation in the mountain Baptist worldview was, ironically, an easy fit for the proletarian revolutionary politics that the NMU brought to eastern Kentucky and to Garland’s family, and it all found easy expression in songs deeply rooted in the mountain traditions.

In 1931, Jim Garland became host to a young NMU organizer named Harry Simms and the two became close friends. On February 10, 1932, Simms was walking along the railroad tracks to Pineville with another man and ran into deputy sheriffs who worked for the coal operators. One of them shot Simms in the gut, and he died the next day. Garland immediately wrote a defiant murder ballad, which Pete Seeger later revived. The elevation of Simms to a Christ figure is hard to miss, as is Garland’s stark language of class consciousness. According to Mark Wilson, the tune is from the Garland family’s version of “The Battle of Mill Springs“, a Civil War ballad which in turn descended from the widespread “Texas Rangers”.

“The Death of Harry Simms” by Jim Garland – Lyrics

Aunt Molly Jackson is well-known for writing a song during Bloody Harlan to the same tune as “Which Side Are You On”. Her song “I Am a Union Woman” is not about workers choosing sides, but the picture it paints is every bit as stark as Reece’s. Of course, she composed many other songs as well. They’re not hard to find online and they’re all worth a listen. But one in particular – “Kentucky Miner’s Wife” aka “Ragged Hungry Blues” – is most interesting for this post, as she used a popular blues form rather than a more traditional Anglo ballad construction to communicate her message. You can hear her introduce and perform the song here as recorded for Columbia in New York in December 1931 in support of the miners in Kentucky. The following Spotify link still includes Aunt Molly telling her story, but the performance of the blues by John Greenway is musically smoother.

“Ragged Hungry Blues” by Aunt Molly Jackson – Lyrics

Sarah Ogan Gunning was thirty years younger than her half-sister Aunt Molly Jackson. What Aunt Molly experienced in middle age during Bloody Harlan, Sarah experienced as a young mother barely in her twenties. As with her brother and half-sister, Sarah contributed much to the labor movement and eventually to the folk music revival that reached its peak in the 1960’s. Her 1965 album Girl of Constant Sorrow can be found on Spotify, as well as on YouTube. As with both of her siblings, it’s well worth the time to explore any of her music. Her horribly sad ‘reality check,’ set to the tune of the hymn “Precious Memories” and rechristened “Dreadful Memories” by Sarah, is quite disturbing and most moving. Another of her songs, “Come All You Coal Miners,” is more like a murder ballad and uses the same tune we heard in her brother’s homage to Harry Simms.

I want to close this section though with the song Pete Seeger said he’d never forget, “I Hate the Company Bosses,” originally titled “I Hate the Capitalist System.” It is a scathing indictment of the coal operators, listing charge by charge what they had done to Sarah’s family. Beyond the personal though, it reflects the radical NMU politics that made such an impact on her. Though it is not a story of one particular murder, it is about as accusatory as a political murder ballad can get.

“I Hate The Company Bosses” by Sarah Ogan Gunning – Lyrics

Coda – “You killed my husband, now you want my son.”

I want to come full circle to close, back to Hazel Dickens. Though the two songs of hers we’ve covered so far in previous weeks both borrow from the old tradition I’ve just described, there is another we should hear that most certainly could have come from a pen in the Garland family.

Last week we heard the story of Jock Yablonski’s murder at the hands of the corrupt president of the UMWA, Tony Boyle. It’s critical to note that support for Boyle began to seriously erode a year earlier, in the days following November 20, 1968, when a massive explosion rocked the Consolidation Coal Company No. 9 mine in the towns of Farmington and Mannington, West Virginia. Rescue operations lasted for over a week, but 78 men were unable to be saved.

“I was only one of the families involved here, but, as if by magnets, we were drawn to the mine to await their rescue. For ten days waiting, hoping and praying that our men could be saved, but only in vain, for on that tenth day the news was announced to us that “the mine would be sealed because the company officials felt that no human life could live after that time.” And so it was to be, 78 good, brave men were sealed in that mine… This was the second explosion to occur in this same mine within fourteen years, killing 16 men the first time. Yet our husband’s great union leader, Mr. Tony Boyle, stood in front of nationwide television with No. 9 still exploding in the background and announced: “This is one of the safest mines around.” Well it kind of makes me shiver all over to think that this was one of the safest. God help the coal miners who work in the other mines.” Mrs. Judith Ann Henderson, widow of Paul Frank Henderson – in Voices From the Mountains

Methane was a constant problem at No. 9. When combined with high levels of coal dust and an ignition source, the results can be catastrophic. However, the company was cited by inspectors for insufficient rock dusting several times in the years leading up to the disaster. This basic safety precaution both prevents coal dust concentration in the air and helps absorb the heat of any methane explosion, thus preventing a chain reaction. While the exact cause of the explosion remains unknown, federal investigators concluded that the company’s insufficient safety measures contributed to the disaster. Tony Boyle, as Mrs. Henderson suggested, took the company’s side immediately, effectively taking the position that ‘these things happen.’ It was the beginning of the end for him; though as we saw last week, he didn’t go down easily.

Hazel Dickens did not have a relative in Consolidation No. 9, but she was one of several musicians who came out to sing for the families to help bolster spirits in the days after the disaster. In some real ways, West Virginia in 1968 was a far cry from Kentucky in 1931. Pay was better and the union had been won in most of the mines, and by then its leaders had gone corrupt. But in terms of facing death for a company that doesn’t care about its workers, Dickens’s song showed in words and music rooted in the mountain tradition that some things hadn’t changed at all for an Appalachian coal miner. Still, songs like Dickens’s would help to win more fights for reform, within the union and without, just as they had been doing for decades. That didn’t change either.

Thanks for reading this week folks!

“Mannington Mine Disaster” by Hazel Dickens – Lyrics