I'll certainly second the Matewan suggestion. It's a great Sayles film, and remarkably radical for a film that had backing from such corporations as Pepsico! Pretty bloody toward the end, but powerfully done. I also agree with the suggestion that you read Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands. I once gave a copy of that book to Phil Hoff, when he was Governor of Vermont, since it describes some problems that are shared by the Cumberlands and the Green Mountains of Vermont.

I hadn't mentioned the Korson material, since the request was for mining songs from West Virginia, but, if we're going a bit farther afield, listen to Helen Schneyer's singing of Joan Boyd's powerful rewrite of "The Fountain Filled with Blood" which is on her Folk-Legacy cassette titled On the Hallelujah Line. It speaks of a mine disaster and observes that the victims were "men who dug each other's graves!" Helen also recorded "The Avondale Mine Disaster" and "The Miner's Prayer" on her other Folk-Legacy cassette: Ballads, Broadsides and Hymns. Look under "custom cassettes" at the Folk-Legacy web site. CLICK HERE .

Even farther afield is Utah Phillips' "Funeral Train" (properly titled, I think, "The Scofield Mine Disaster", although I don't remember how to spell it). It tells of a mine explosion in 1900 in Utah and reminds us that "in one family there were nine, trapped inside that burning mine!" Very moving song.

Jean Ritchie's splendid "Black Waters" encapsulates the entire history of the mountain people being robbed of their lands through the trickery of the mineral rights leases they gave to outside corporations. They gave away the coal under their farms for pennies per acre, which was bad enough, but they also gave the developers the right to take their timber for the mines and to slash roads through to the sites, etc. KYtrad can tell you all about it. You've got a lot of heavy history to offer your students! Good luck with it.

Sandy