Close your eyes and imagine that you are in the mountains, deep in a hollow in a small community where everyone’s livelihood is controlled by one industry—coal. Imagine that each family has been impacted by that industry: the loss of loved ones in violent accidents or to the long slow suffocation of black lung, the loss of jobs, and the loss of what mountain people hold most dear—the mountains themselves.
Imagine again that you are seated on the porch of one of those homes, listening to someone telling the story of these people and their place in song. Simple, unaccompanied ballads that speak of life and death, passion, love, sadness, frustration, anger and defiance.
Open your eyes. You are listening to Coalfield A Cappella, a CD of original songs about the coalfields and their people, by Dr. Shirley Stewart Burns.
Burns knows all too well the struggles of the people about whom she sings. Raised in the coalfields of Wyoming County, West Virginia, Burns lost her grandfather and her father to the mines. She witnessed firsthand the painful death of black lung and she saw community after community die out as mines closed or new methods replaced manpower with big machinery. She saw water turn orange from mine drainage and communities drown in floods that made worse because denuded mountains and filled-in streams could not hold back rapid drainage from heavy rains.
An Appalachian scholar with a strong voice in the anti-mountaintop removal fight, Burns turned her pen from writing books about the tragic changes in the coalfields to composing songs in the way that mountain people know best—ballads. Her ballads tell stories: the story of a woman beaten down but not defeated by what mining has done to her family in “Ode to a Miner’s Wife;” of a man who turned to drink after witnessing the deaths of his sons in the mines in “Drunkard’s Lament.” Her sorrow at the loss of her father is laid bare in “Ode to a Miner,” and her sardonic look at mountaintop removal mining seems almost playful in the ominous “Pretty Mountains.” “There Goes Another Mountain” is an elegy to mountains stripped of their tops and their trees, their insides laid bare in the haste to dig coal out of their hearts. Still, Burns ends the recording with a song of faith and hope to complete this haunting collection.
