Coal Country Music—A review
By Janet Keating, Executive Director, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition
Whether you love good music, intact mountains or both, the Coal Country Music CD (deluxe) is guaranteed to open your heart and mind to the love-hate relationship that Appalachians have with coal mining. Warning: this CD should not be judged on a single listen or an individual tune. Each song and singer, like a unique quilt square, adds something special to the wholeness of the Appalachian experience—reflecting the highs and lows, of Coal Country.
My favorite way to experience this music is by listening over and over during a slow, deliberate drive through the ancient hills and hollows, surrounded by the very mountains that birthed and inspired iconic Appalachian singers like Ralph Stanley and Jean Ritchie. Ralph Stanley and the Cedar Hill Refuges provide the opener with the haunting traditional “Keys to the Kingdom,” an apt beginning for this musical journey—a sure sign that life in Appalachia is a hard path fraught with so much peril that it’s best met with an even stronger faith in God.
The lighter “Acony Bell” which follows, balances this dirge-like opener with an up-beat and down-to-earth country harmony sung by Gillian Welch and David Rawlings—highlighted with clear bell-like guitar strains, likely not a coincidental arrangement. This sweet tune, coursing with optimism and hope— simplicity pure as a little white flower and the yellow bird’s song in an early Appalachian spring—is sure to warm the heart, suggesting that the Appalachian experience, despite it’s hardship, has a sunnier side.
A stand-out song, “Red-winged Blackbird,” is written by Billy Edd Wheeler, a gifted Appalachian “Renaissance” man born in Boone County, WV, and sung by another singer/song-writer of West Virginia, the much-loved Kathy Mattea. Wheeler’s lyrics reveal how the Appalachian people, so close to the land, often view their lives and times through the lenses of nature. How could the sight of a Red-winged Blackbird, adorned in feathers “black as the coal,” with a “blood-red spot on its wing,” evoke such feelings of dread? True to life, it is the ultimate living nightmare of a miner’s wife—her beloved carried from the coal mine dead—red on black.
Life in Appalachia is complicated— rich in natural resources like coal and timber, yet replete with a lengthy history of impoverishment and oppression by outside speculators, severe mine bosses, and corrupt politicians. Add the hard-working, courageous people who are drawn to this place of incomparable natural beauty, and one might easily predict frequent conflict and real-life tragedy with the mountains and mines serving as the backdrop. Some escape to a better life, but the longing for Appalachia abides nonetheless, calling them back.
John Prine’s “Paradise,” after more than two decades still rings true as “Mr. Peabody’s coal train” hauls away the peaks of Central Appalachia through mountain range removal—the coal industry’s final insult to the people and the land. But Appalachians are not taking the destruction of their landscape and home places sitting down. Shirley Stewart Burns’ ode “Leave Those Mountains Down,” sung in traditional acapella warns and indicts King Coal for blasting the mountains for the sake of profit and pleads with miners to “Leave those mountains down.” A similar-styled, yet different kind of “warning” comes through Jean Richie’s “Now is the Cool of the Day”—a single voice joined by ethereal harmonies— lyrics one expects at church, with a clear message that the land and all life is sacred.
No CD about life in Coal Country would be complete without a union song and “Which Side Are You On,” by Florence Reece, as sung by Natalie Merchant, which nowadays takes on a different meaning. With the steep decline of the United Mine Workers of America and the number of non-union miners clearly outnumbering the UMWA, this classic organizing tune might better depict the current conflict of those who want to preserve the mountains vs. those miners whose ancestors once died at the hands of coal companies, now ironically siding with the King Coal. The banjo picking and drone of the fiddle sets the listener squarely in Appalachia as Merchant’s bluesy-country voice pleads “Which side, which side,” evoking scenes of struggle and conflict.
All these songs and so many more make up Coal Country Music, a CD produced by Heartwood, thanks to Andy Mahler and Jason Wilber, whose own tune, “In Her Veins,” reminds us that Mother Earth abides in spite of our indifference. And the solution, as a country favorite, Willie Nelson suggests, is indeed “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
This collect of diverse songs, a labor of love no doubt, was born out of an urgent need to raise public awareness in addition to financial resources to protect what is left of the mountains of Central Appalachia. All of the proceeds from this work of art will go to support The Alliance for Appalachia, a coalition of organizations working to end mountaintop removal and promote a clean and just energy future in Central Appalachia. To buy Coal Country Music go to http://prostores2.carrierzone.com/servlet/liaisonrecordscom/Detail?no= 1398 or any major retail website (Amazon, iTunes, WalMart, etc.). To learn how you can help save the mountains and people of Central Appalachia go to www.ilovemountains.org.