The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #114368 Message #2439777
Posted By: Joe Offer
14-Sep-08 - 01:29 AM
Thread Name: Lyr Add: There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood
Subject: Lyr Add: FOUNTAIN FILLED WITH BLOOD (Joan B Short)
With the Getaway coming up, I thought I ought to work on some songs I've wanted to learn. This transcription is just a bit different from what I found in the Digital Tradition, so I thought I'd post it.
FOUNTAIN FILLED WITH BLOOD
(Joan Boyd Short)
There is a fountain filled with blood
The blood of our mining men so brave
Who worked together in the black coal pits
Men who dug each other's graves
Burden pattern:
Men who dug each other's graves, O Lord,
Men who dug each other's graves.
Who worked together in the black coal pits
Men who dug each other's graves.
There is a stream that's filled with tears
The tears of our children and our wives
For their husbands and sons, all good mining men
Who so senselessly have died
There is a river filled with blood
That once was so beautiful and grand
'Til the strip miners tore down our mountainside
Now it runs brown with the blood of our land
There is a fountain filled with blood
The blood of our brave mining men
Let us stand beneath its powerful flood
Be revived to fight and win.
copyright Joan Boyd Short
transcribed from the 1981 Helen Schneyer album "On the Hallelujah Line", Folk Legacy records
Tune: "Fountain filled with blood," traditional hymn,
written or transcribed by Lowell Mason, found in many hymn books
The Music of Coal CD collection (Lonesome Records and Publishing, 2007) has a recording of this song by Elder James Caudill. The Caudill recording is closer to the Digital Tradition text, but includes only verses 1, 2, and 4. Here are the notes from Music of Coal:When singer and songwriter Joan Boyd Short of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, composed this song in 1969, it was at the dawning of a great cultural awakening in Appalachia. Short says, "I based this song on a familiar hymn I had sung all my life in my little, rural Methodist church outside Chattanooga." And Short's grandfather, a coal miner in Sequatchie Valley near Whitwell, Tennessee, had died of black lung. Late in Short's father's life, he told her, for the first time, some family coal mining stories as the two sat on a rock at the foot of the mine where her grandfather had worked. Joan began to wonder about what the women and children did, faced with the death of a father and husband, or a son and brother. The idea for this song sprang from that special day.
Anybody know anything else about Joan Boyd Short? Google tells me whe's a member of the Friends of the Carter Family Fold Steering Committee, so apparently she's still involved in music.
-Joe-