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Company Town
For the folks living in the out-of-mind hollers of southern West Virginia, east Kentucky and southwest Virginia, for whom King Coal’s footprints have grown heavy enough to not only ruin the land, but change its face forever. What nature has taken hundreds of millions of years to sculpt, corporate profiteers can obliterate in a matter of days and a few hundred tons of explosives. We will never forget.
AM - vocals, guitar
Jeff Arey - banjo
Keith Dill - fiddle
John Rickard - harmony vocal
Words & music A. McKnight, ©1998 Catalooch Music, BMI
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,
under this company town
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
Tag
til the life's all drained out, of a company town
