Sixteen Tons .
"Sixteen Tons" is a song about the misery of coal mining, first recorded in 1946 by U.S. country singer Merle Travis and released on his box set album Folk Songs of the Hills the following year. A 1955 version recorded by 'Tennessee' Ernie Ford was on the b-side of his cover of the Moon Mullican standard, "You Don't Have to Be a Baby to Cry". However, it was Ford's "Sixteen Tons" that reached number one in the Billboard charts, besting the performance of the competing version by Johnny Desmond. Another competing version by Frankie Laine was released only in the U.K. where it gave Ford's version some stiff competition on the charts. On October 17, it was released and, by October 28, it sold 400,000 copies. On November 10, a million copies had been sold. The record had sold two million copies by December 15.
The well-known chorus runs:
You load sixteen tons, and what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store...
According to Travis, the line from the chorus "another day older and deeper in debt" was a phrase often used by his father, a coalminer himself.
This and the line "I owe my soul to the company store" is a reference to the truck system and to debt bondage. Under this system workers were not paid cash; rather they were paid with unexchangeable credit vouchers for goods at the company store (usually referred to as scrip). This made it impossible for workers to store up cash savings. Workers also usually lived in company-owned dormitories or apartment buildings, the rent for which was automatically deducted from their pay.
In the U.S. the truck system and associated debt bondage persisted until the strikes of the newly-formed United Mine Workers and affiliated unions forced an end to such practices.
Slang explained :
1 . A "straw boss," according to Wentworth & Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang, is "the boss attended to the grain going into the thresher; the second-man watched after the straw coming out and hence had little to do."
2 . The term "script" or "scrip" refers to a piece of paper printed by employer and used to pay its workers in lieu of money. The script is, naturally, only good at the company's stores, allowing it to charge whatever it wants.
3 . The term "cane-brake" is derived from the term "brake," for bracken swamps, that surrounded cane fields. (This is why the crotalus horridus atricaudatus rattlesnake is often called a "cane breaks;" it lives in these lowland swamps.)
4 . The term "number nine coal" was a little trickier to track down. "For some time, miners had followed the custom of naming the main pay zones of minerals, and numbering the splits, as in "Pocahontas Number Nine Coal" or "the Great Gossan Lead" for example. This method seemed to allow more flexibility, so it worked its way into use by the scientific community, and is now known as the Geological Time Scale." (Friends of Roan Mountain Newsletter, Volume 5, No. 1, Winter 2001) All sorts of coal gradations exist.
Ernest Jennings Ford (February 13, 1919 – October 17, 1991),
better known as Tennessee Ernie Ford, an American recording artist and television host who enjoyed success in the country & western, pop and gospel musical genres.
Ford scored an unexpected hit on the pop charts in 1955 with his rendition of Merle Travis' "Sixteen Tons," a sparsely arranged coal-miner's lament that Travis wrote in 1946, based on his own family's experience in the mines of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Its fatalistic tone contrasted vividly with the sugary pop ballads and the rock and roll just starting to dominate the charts at the time:
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store...
With a unique clarinet-driven pop arrangement by Ford's musical director, Jack Fascinato, "Sixteen Tons" spent ten weeks at number one on the country charts and eight weeks at number one on the pop charts, and made Ford a crossover star. It became Ford's 'signature song.'
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