“He’s had more hard luck than most men could stand/ The mines was his first love but never his friend,” opens “Black Lung,” a tune penned by West Virginia bluegrass singer Hazel Dickens in 1969. In ...

Beyond details gleaned from artifacts like early photographs and hand-written letters, what we know of miners’ lives during California’s Gold Rush era comes to us from mining songs — the simple, ...

Rupert Holmes wrote the song, “Timothy,” hoping to create a buzz for the band, The Buoys, which hailed from Northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal region, in 1971. Forty-two years later, the catchy pop tune ...

Folklorist Archie Green blows the dust off old coal-mining songs, revealing the souls of long-dead miners and their struggles to survive. With his book Only a Miner, folklorist Archie Green unearths ...