2025 Competition Entry:

Number 3 by Michael & Ginger Swartz

Genre

Country

Website

Co-writer(s)

no

Performer(s)

Mike Swartz Writer/Guitar/Vocals
Ginger Swartz. Vocals

Description

November 20, 1969 a massive coal mine explosion happened in Mannington West Virginia.
99 miners were trapped underground, 21 got out alive. A few months later 40,000 miners went on a nationwide strike to protest the abhorrent safety conditions, including the use of child labor. This is a song about one boy and one of many mine tragedies that happened in our state.

Bio

Lyrics

The town crier, screams there’s a fire in mine shaft number three.
The town folk rush
the mountain, praying
for it not to
be. Everything changed on the mountain, forever on that day, by a
methane blast that could be heard 12
miles away.
Nine days now not a sound, from the miners a mile underground. Down in the rubble and black dust lies a young boy who felt he
must, be
like Brothers and like Dad, no choice of future,
only one he had.
In *69 death rolled
down the mountain, knocked on seventy seven doors. Now those miners
no longer, owe their souls to the company store, but to the angels on the mountain, now and
forever, ever more.
On a foggy Sunday morning from the church house they flow, up
the cold and snowy mountain praying
in quite reverent tones. They stand
at the statute of seventy- seven men lost in fire, smoke and dust, and lay a wreath on a small cross of a ten year old – boy
who felt he must. Be like Brothers and
like Dad, now no future,
only one he ever had.

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