This is a pretty straightforward story of a mining disaster in West Virginia, told from the point of view of the wife of one of the miners who died. The worst part is that even after losing her husband and other members of the community in the disaster, she's going to have to send her own sons to work in the mines because they are too poor to do anything else. She can't even afford to give them the little education it would take to get them the less dangerous above-ground jobs related to the mine, they will have to dig underground, doing the most dangerous jobs in the mine, and risk the same fate as the miners who died in the disaster, including presumably their own father. The song is hauntingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly sad and maddening that we still send people to work under these conditions, and don't pay them what their effort and the danger they live under is worth.
This is a pretty straightforward story of a mining disaster in West Virginia, told from the point of view of the wife of one of the miners who died. The worst part is that even after losing her husband and other members of the community in the disaster, she's going to have to send her own sons to work in the mines because they are too poor to do anything else. She can't even afford to give them the little education it would take to get them the less dangerous above-ground jobs related to the mine, they will have to dig underground, doing the most dangerous jobs in the mine, and risk the same fate as the miners who died in the disaster, including presumably their own father. The song is hauntingly beautiful and gut-wrenchingly sad and maddening that we still send people to work under these conditions, and don't pay them what their effort and the danger they live under is worth.