Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Dark As A Dungeon

From the album "Roadhouse"
Zoomer Roberts: vocals, keyboard bass
Buddy Winston: guitars
Eric Hutson: drums

This Merle Travis classic has such a solemn, hymn-like quality to it that one almost forgets the earthiness of the subject matter: coal mining. Travis preferred singing about mining to actually doing it. John R. Cash, who preferred selling vacuum cleaners to mining, put this out as a single in the 1960s. I've been singing it for forty years and haven't been "way down in the mine" yet. West Texas isn't coal country.