The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #20722   Message #4168724
Posted By: GUEST,henryp
28-Mar-23 - 10:23 AM
Thread Name: Songs About Disease
Subject: RE: Songs About Disease
From: Stilly River Sage Date: 19 Mar 23 - 02:44 PM
In the early 1980s, I spent a couple of years living in Kentucky. On the local public radio station, one of the station-produced programs played a song, sung by a woman and from the woman's point of view, talking about the dangers of mining and of black lung. I can't remember anything about it to hunt it down, but it was simply beautiful and heartbreaking. This note is to simply acknowledge that song's existence. :)

Could it be Black Lung, sung unaccompanied by Hazel Dickens? She was the eighth child of an eleven-child mining family in West Virginia. "Her music is characterized by not only her "high lonesome" singing style but also by her provocative pro-union, feminist songs."

https://www.last.fm/music/Hazel+Dickens/_/Black+Lung