Heavy Work

Song 371: This week’s playlist track is Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford, written by Merle Travis, and you can find the YouTube video of it here. It seems appropriate, in honor of Labor Day, to post a work song, and I learned this golden oldie at quite a young age, though when I first heard it, on a TV show in the early 1960s, it had already been around for a few years. It also appeared among my Ohio relatives' extensive country collection, so during our even-numbered-year summer visits there in that decade, I would usually include this record as part of my listening fun, with my aunt and uncle letting me choose the discs I wanted to spin. While my father didn’t work in a coal mine, what he got from his full-time job was also another day older and deeper in debt, which is a line that came from a letter written to the songwriter by his brother. It was their father, a coal miner, who said to them, "I can’t afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store." All too often in our history, a group of wealthy greed-heads have succeeded in dividing and conquering the working class, through techniques such as segregation, racism and xenophobia, to keep the workers from uniting in large-enough numbers to demand and receive a living wage. Until laborers get beyond such divisions, most of them will continue to owe their souls to the company store.