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Hey Boys Let It Ring There's a letter than even chance a guy who was coming out to our part of the country in those times would have ended up in hard rock mining. It's a cinch that there's more money to be made in mining, taking the copper and the silver and the iron out of the ground, than there is in cattle ranching or in a lot of other things. Gold camps and silver camps are instant wealth propositions, so a lot of people were interested in recouping their lost fortunes or building some kind of a life of their own in those camps. I talked to some old-timers in a bar up in Butte, Montana, who had been mining the Anaconda years before. I was interested in the difference in hard rock mining back then and the way it's done today. It hasn't changed a great deal; it's still very hard, back-breaking work. The Anaconda was pioneered by Marcus Daly, a brilliant mine engineer. He pioneered the Little Emma silver mine in Alta Canyon, Utah. It was that silver lode that became the backbone of the Hearst fortune. Daly decided that if he could do it for Hearst, he might as well do it for himself. He went up to Anaconda and opened a big open pit copper mine. As long as Daly was in charge of that town the town was never union. In those days that would have been the W. F. M. , the Western Federation of Miners. Daly was smart; every time it looked like the town was going to go union, held give the workers something like a park or a swimming pool or another day's vacation. He bought them off, and it worked. The conditions were rotten, the wages were low, the hours were long, but as long as the miners had their free park and swimming pool they didn't seem to mind. Of course, when Daly died the whole damn town went union. The Clark in this song was a crooked politician. He and Daly fought one of the most corrupt political battles in that part of the country. I think Daly pretty well proved that Clark was outclassed. That conflict is still well remembered up in Montana. The Ontario is an underground mine in the Masabi, an iron mine. Most hard rock miners would rather work open pit than work underground where it's boiling hot no matter what the weather is like topside. Besides, when you're working underground you risk the explosion of mine gas, floods, and rock falls. If you're working in the open pit you stand a chance of getting out of the way. I never figured out what the tune was till Saul Broudy started playing it on the harmonica and it came out sounding like "Camptown Races''. Writing these songs about events in the West, I've tried to use tunes that were contemporary with the times, tunes these boys might have known, or make up tunes that are similar. It makes it easier for me to describe the things I want to. In the chorus, these boys were involved in an activity known as doublejacking. They were working in the mine in pairs. You've got one guy called the twister who has an iron drill bit which he lays over his shoulder and puts up against the rock face. The pounder stands behind him with a double jack hammer. He hits the drill bit, the twister twists it, he hits it again, and so on, until you get a bore hole to set a powder charge, or you crack a fissure and the rock falls away. Then you chop it up and put it in the ore carts and send it to the top. The chorus is a tongue-twister if you're trying to teach it to a crowd, but it becomes a lot easier if you sing it slow a couple of times and ask the people to visualize what's happening. |
(sung to chorus tune) (sung to verse tune) (sung to chorus tune) Copyright ©1973, 2000 Bruce Phillips |
