Cover Photo: Figure 1 Miner Loading Cart with Shovel (West Virginia History OnView)
D&E Student Blog: This blog post was written by a D&E student, Chiebuka Soribe, in the ENGL 326: Writing for the Community course as a collaboration with Augusta.
I didn’t grow up in a coal town. But as I continue college in Elkins, WV, I hear more and more about coal mining and the stories passed down through families. However, it wasn’t until I listened to Michael Kline’s 1985 recording of coal mining songs that I began to understand the emotional and cultural effects that coal mining has had.
Kline’s session, part of Augusta’s Vocal Week, doesn’t just play a collection of songs. It tells stories hidden in the lyrics of people like Hazel Dickens and Jean Ritchie. Songs like “Clay County Miner” and “Blue Diamond Mines” weren’t just simple tunes but acted as memorials or manifestos.
For example, Dickens’s “Clay County Miner” tells the story of a miner who works hard, knowing that the work will put his life at risk. The lyrics describe a man with “dust in his lungs and a dream in his eyes,” showing the cost of mining but also the unbreakable spirit that miners carry for their families.
Alternatively, Ritchie’s “Blue Diamond Mines” serves almost as a protest anthem. Ritchie sings about the mistreatment of miners by the companies they work for. Lyrics like “They’ll tear your soul apart for a few lumps of coal” make it clear that mining corporations exploit not only land but people as well. In this way, the song becomes a protest against economic injustice, a voice of anger, and a demand for recognition. Both songs don’t just recount facts; they tap into emotion and memory.
Figure 1 Miner Loading Cart with Shovel (West Virginia History OnView).
Growing up, I often heard jokes about people who lived in West Virginia and their so-called “backward” way of life. However, these songs reveal more about this region. They paint it as region that sings not despite its pain, but because of it. It’s a place where music becomes a form of memory and resistance. Songs like Dickens’s “Black Lung” make that connection painfully clear. Dickens sings, “Lord, I never thought I’d live to love the coal dust, never thought I’d pray to die.” Through these lines, she captures a brutal truth, that generations of miners accept suffering as part of survival. By singing about it, she refuses to let that suffering be ignored. Listening to “Black Lung” introduced me to a grief that I never experienced, but one that felt heartbreakingly familiar. This song in particular reminded me that these songs are reality.
What stood out to me most was the way these songs bring the themes of community, survival, and resistance into every line. As someone now learning more about this region’s history and its struggles, this music offers more than historical context, it offers the opportunity to empathize. Listening to these voices, you start to understand that these hardships faced by the people of Appalachia aren’t just historical facts. They are living realities.
I think we often forget that culture doesn’t only live in museums or textbooks, it lives in the voices of people. In Appalachia, those voices sing through the dust. They echo in the mountains with the rise and fall of beautiful vocals. These aren’t polished, commercialized audios made for the masses, they are raw, honest emotions of lives affected by poverty and greed.
Every song feels like a testimony, a way of saying, We are here. We matter. In a world where so many communities are marginalized or forgotten, the music of Appalachia refuses to let their stories disappear. They invite listeners to see and to feel even a fraction of the pain, and persistence that defines the region.
D&E Student Bio: Originally from Maryland, Chiebuka Soribe is currently a sophomore at Davis & Elkins College. He is an English major and film minor, and he plays on the Men’s Lacrosse team.
Work Cited:
Miner Loading Cart with Shovel. Image. N.d. Identifier: 003113, West Virginia History OnView. West Virginia & Regional History Center, accessed 28 April, 2025, https://wvhistoryonview.org/catalog/003113.