Mining & Merle Travis

With today's memorial for the West Virginia miners, I'm reminded of Merle Travis. No one wrote or performed better songs about mining. For example, "Dark As A Dungeon":

Come and listen you fellows, so young and so fine,
And seek not your fortune in the dark, dreary mines.
It will form as a habit and seep in your soul,
'Till the stream of your blood is as black as the coal.

CHORUS:
It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew,
Where danger is double and pleasures are few,
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mine.

It's a-many a man I have seen in my day,
Who lived just to labor his whole life away.
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine,
A man will have lust for the lure of the mines.
I hope when I'm gone and the ages shall roll,
My body will blacken and turn into coal.
Then I'll look from the door of my heavenly home,
And pity the miner a-diggin' my bones.

Or "Nine Pound Hammer":

Notice Travis picks with just 2 fingers, not 3 as most guitarists today. Doc Watson learned from Travis and also uses 2 (and named his son after Travis). In fact, I learned the same with considerable less skill: but as a child, Mom used to drop us off at a TV station in the daytime now and again, which served as a daycare center unofficially, where an all afternoon country music show was on live and Merle Travis was a regular. So was Joe Maphis. Farmers Market was near the station, so mothers would drop off their kids and go shop!

What a wonderful youth I had in Southern California in the late 40s and early 50s!