Words and music by Andrew McKnight
© 1999 Catalooch Music, BMI
from Turning Pages
(FM-1031) 2001 Falling Mountain Music
(also appears on the compilation CD Moving Mountains: Voices of Appalachia Rise Up Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining)

Verse 1
Coal trains run through our veins,
moving monuments to better days
that mountain stands over our darkened lungs,
we've time to ponder what we've become

Chorus
In this company town, it's what we know,
change comes hard, change comes slow
until the bottom falls out, that's how it goes down,
til the money's all drained, from a company town

Verse 2
Well-dressed Yankee bosses worked us so hard,
for their well-dressed children and well-kept yards
while coal camps echoed with mournful sounds,
of impoverished voices from deep in the ground,

Chorus

Bridge
Our parents' memories of World War II
the mines worked round the clock, was the American thing to do
families gathered round their radios,
to hear FDR say, we'd make it somehow, in our town

Verse 3
Bright shafts of morning light,
on jobless faces and their grim plight,
while four men and a dragline blow the mountaintop off,
to take its heart out, now it knows what we've lost

Chorus

til the life's all drained out, of a company town