Here's one I wrote and recorded on my 'On The Rocks' CD a few years ago.

MY FATHER WAS A MINER
(Seamus Kennedy, Gransha Music)


I wrote this song for my friend Bruce Cunningham of Scranton, PA, whose father Jim was a coal-miner in the Lackawanna Valley mines. Bruce related several stories about his dad to me one night in the Banshee Pub in Scranton, and I mentioned that they'd make a good song. He immediately challenged me to write one. This is it. Thanks to Bruce and to his dad for the inspiration.


My father was a miner
As his father was before him,
Hacking out the anthracite
From the Pennsylvania clay,
He left school at fifteen,
Was down the mines at sixteen,
At nineteen he was married
And soon I was on the way.

At seven every morning,
My mother made him breakfast,
Then he'd walk down to the pithead
With all the other men.
He'd swing his old lunch bucket,
As she watched him from the window,
Wond'ring if this was the day
That she would not see him again.

His name is Jim Cunningham,
from Lackawanna County,
Like all his childhood buddies
He toiled at digging coal.
Risking black-lung and cave-ins,
And flying red-hot splinters,
And bleeding ruptured eardrums
After "Fire in the hole!"

While crawling in a shaft one day
To hew a brand-new coalface,
He didn't hear the timbers creak
Or the rumble overhead,
But a hand reached in and grabbed him,
And pulled him from the tunnel,
Just another second later
And my dad would have been dead.

Well, he finished out his shift,
There was no time off for dyin',
That night he told my mother,
And she began to keen and moan,
She threw his supper on the table,
Her eyes were red with cryin'.
Saying, "If you go down tomorrow,
I won't be here when you come home."

So now he drives a truck
For a bakery here in Scranton,
And once a week I help him
With deliveries round the town.
He lived to see us growin',
And it keeps my mother happy,
But sometimes I think for one more day,
He'd love to go back down.

One morning having coffee
In a nearby Dunkin' Donuts,
An older man came in
And sat down not too far away.
My father brought me over,
And said, "Shake hands with Ray Hinkley,
If it hadn't been for him, son,
I would not be here today."

I whispered, "Thank you, Mr. Hinkley."
As I took his hand and shook it.
My tears fell hot and heavy,
So I could scarcely see.
He put a big hand on my shoulder,
And pulled me close beside him,
Saying, "Your dad and I are miners,
He'd have done the same for me."

My father was a miner,
As his father was before him,
Hacking out the anthracite
From the Pennsylvania clay.