As there were hundreds of mines, so too there were hundreds of coal camps. Thus there was a multitude of small communities of black miners and their families scattered throughout the coal fields. So numerous were the mines and the “small villages” erected nearby that in certain areas only property lines separated one company town from the next—not unlike major urban regions today where one suburban community is separated from the next only by a major thoroughfare.1
Creating an Image of Black Miners in West Virginia
In order to study the audience for big band jazz and dance music, it is desirable to form a visual impression of the African American miners of the period who constituted the majority of that audience. Fortunately, several photographers who resided in the Mountain State took pictures of mining operations, the company towns associated with them, and the miners themselves.
Sometime during the course of 1931, one of these photographers, Ruffus E. “Red” Ribble, drove not quite two miles from his home in Mount Hope, West Virginia, to take pictures at the Price Hill Colliery Company’s mine located just south of Mount Hope in the New River coalfield. His camera was a distinctive Kodak #8 Cirkut Outfit. “Cirkut Outfit” was the manufacturer’s term for a camera that could take two kinds of pictures: conventional photos and panoramic ones. Ribble gained a reputation in the state for his panoramic photos of various locations in the region, groups of high school graduates, church congregations, family reunions, and, with some regularity, coal miners (Mark Crabtree. Cirkut Panoramic Photos by Ruffus E. “Red” Ribble. homepage.mac.com/crabtree/ribble.htm [accessed January 6, 2011]).
At different times in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, dozens of miners posed while Ribble’s camera swept from left to right as much as 180 degrees. The resulting pictures are quite impressive: a #8 Cirkut Outfit routinely created images eight inches wide and up to four feet long. One such photo was taken at the Price Hill operation, located at the end of the Loup Creek branch line of the C&O Railway built to serve several mines south of the New River. The miners arranged themselves in two long rows, forty men sitting in front, fifty-eight standing behind them (see detail, Fig. 1.1). Joining the miners was A. P. Burdiss, the mine superintendent and foreman at the time (Annual Report of the Department of Mines, 1931, 45). A second man, probably his assistant, was more casually dressed. All of the rest were wearing heavy dark coveralls, hard hats equipped with battery-powered electric lamps, and heavy boots. Each of the miners in the front sat next to his shiny metal lunch bucket.
Fig. 1.1. The Afternoon Shift at the Price Hill Colliery Company Mine, Price Hill, W.Va. 1931 (detail). Six of the shift’s thirteen black miners stand in the back row to the right. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection)
Ribble’s photograph is labeled simply Price Hill, W.Va. 1931. The names of the individuals in the image are nowhere to be found nor is the specific date on which the photo was shot. It was taken in full daylight, making it probable that these men made up the second or afternoon shift that would have begun work around 3:00 p.m. and returned to the surface around 11:00 p.m. Further evidence that the photograph was taken before the men went underground is that their faces and hands were clean.
Of the total of thirteen African Americans who appear in the complete picture, six stand together in the back row to the right in the portion shown in Figure 1.1. That one can distinguish them from their white co-workers is further evidence that this image was taken before the shift entered the mine. At the end of the work day, it would have been virtually impossible to identify any of the men by race; coal dust would have turned everyone’s face black.
Knowing nothing of the identities of these black miners is unfortunate, because it would have been desirable to profile one or another of them as representatives of the black communities of West Virginia’s coalfields: to learn where he was born, when he entered the mines, the nature of his work, and how he spent his leisure time. Did he go to dances? Did he like big band jazz? Despite the absence of such information, any one of these individuals can serve as the prototypical African American Mountaineer who mined coal for a living and entertained himself and members of his family by attending dances for which some of the leading black dance bands of the 1930s and early 1940s provided the music.
The Work of a Miner
What was the nature of the work done by the men at the Price Hill mine and at the hundreds of similar operations in West Virginia’s coalfields? Here again, William Tams’s personal history of coal mining is informative for its discussion of the work of a typical miner (“the loader”), beginning with a description of the job as performed early in the twentieth century and followed by a discussion of its subsequent evolution with the gradual arrival of mechanization. The following excerpt focuses attention on the loader’s job in the early 1930s:
The loader carried into the mine his picks, shovels, auger, tamping bar, fuse and a can of black powder. He was charged fifty cents per month for the services of the company blacksmith in re-sharpening and tempering the pick.... There were two men in each room face and one man at the narrower entry faces. The man’s partner was called his “buddy.”... After taking two-and-a-half to three hours to make an undercut, the miners drilled, loaded, and fired the holes, bringing down the undercut coal. They then pushed up empty mine cars from the room mouth, loaded them, and returned them to the entry. They set the necessary safety props, extended the room track as needed, ate their mid-day meal, and continued to the end of the shift. The miner put his brass check near the bottom of each car he loaded. The check was removed after the car was dumped at the tipple and the load credited to the proper man. (Tams 1963, 35–36)
Tams’s use of his industry’s terminology calls for some explanation. “To make an undercut” required the miner either to get down on his knees or to lie prone in order to create, using his pick axe, an opening at the bottom of the coal face that was as wide as the “room”: the area he was assigned to mine. Rooms extended at right angles to the “haulage road” that connected them to the mine’s entrance. “Haulage” was facilitated by narrow-gauge railroad tracks on which rolled the cars of mined coal, initially pulled by mules or ponies, later by electric engines termed “motors.” A room might be as wide as twenty-four feet. As Tams put it, “forearms and wrists furnished the power” to make that undercut, typically five feet into the coal seam (Tams 1963, 39).
Fig. 1.2. A pile of coal just blown down from the coal face. Now the hand loading begins. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection)
The auger and tamping bar enabled the miner first to drill several holes into the coal seam above the undercut and then to tamp tightly into each hole paper cartridges of dynamite followed by clay and dirt, along with a fuse. Once the charges were in place, the fuses were lit, and the miner warned those within earshot of the impending blast by shouting “Fire in the hole!” The dynamite exploded, bringing down the coal that the undercut had undermined, so to speak. Only at that point did the term “loader” take on its full meaning: the miner put a round metal tag, the “brass check” on which was stamped his payroll number, on a hook near the bottom of the interior of a mine car and then loaded that car with the loosened coal (see Fig. 1.2). Once it was filled, he and his assistant would push the car toward the haulage road for others to take to the surface. Then the entire process was repeated. The miner would be credited for the tonnage dug when his cars were weighed and unloaded, literally tipped over, in a building appropriately named “the tipple.”
Tams subsequently described the impact of the first widely used mechanical equipment: the cutting machine. “In the old days, two miners, working in a room twenty-four feet wide, required two-and-a-half to three hours to complete a cut five feet deep. The electric cutting machine made a cut six feet deep across a thirty-foot room in thirty minutes. These machines were operated on the night shift, and miners working on the day shift had only to shoot down and load coal” (Tams 1963, 40).
Issues of Safety: What Tams Neglected to Disc
uss
While to some readers discussion of mine safety may appear to represent a significant departure from the culture of big band jazz in black West Virginia, the topic is important to an understanding of the risks to the lives of those who underwrote that culture. Though highly informative, the description of mining provided by Tams is quite selective. Read uncritically, his description of the work involved in mining coal suggests a fairly simple process with few risks, if properly done. In truth, mining was arduous work and very dangerous. He did mention one cause of accidents: improperly tamped explosives that would direct their energy not into the coal that surrounded them but back out the hole drilled by the miner, possibly igniting coal dust and/or methane gas, another by-product of the geological processes that had created the coal in the first place. Such accidents could be disastrous, as Tams noted elsewhere, and, rather conveniently for the mine’s owners, their cause could always be attributed to the miner’s carelessness since he would not have been alive to defend himself. One instance of such a “blown-out shot” killed fifty miners in 1907 (Tams 1963, 48–49).
He also neglected to mention the principal cause of injury and death: the “roof fall.” While the vegetation of the Carboniferous Period of geologic history metamorphosed into coal, the mud that often surrounded it was transformed into shale, erroneously but commonly referred to as “slate” in the industry. A sedimentary rock, shale lacks any internal strength and without support could come crashing down on unsuspecting miners. To prevent such roof falls, as Tams noted, setting “safety props” was an important first step to be taken after coal was blasted from the face and shoveled into the mine cars (see Fig. 1.3). But the period of time between the explosion and the placement of those props was dangerous: the roof could fall before they were in position. In some instances, the props could also prove inadequate to support the weight of the overhanging shale, resulting in injury or death when they gave way. The evidence of the risks of roof falls is unmistakable: from 1883 to 1941, of 14,587 miners killed underground, 8,134 (55.76 percent) died from roof falls (Department of Mines 1941, 174–75).
Fig. 1.3. A black miner propping up the roof of a haulage way; note portion of track in the lower left hand corner. The props were essential to supporting the roof. At the time of the photo, the beams appear to be sagging in the upper right; the props should secure them. (West Virginia and Regional History Collection)
Moreover, Tams did not address accidents resulting from environmental conditions underground, such as the development of pockets of methane gas or accumulations of coal dust caused by the numerous, otherwise controlled, explosions. Neither of these conditions was within the individual miners’ power to prevent, and it was precisely these conditions that led to massive explosions that killed dozens, if not hundreds, of miners. Companies were supposed to provide fire hoses for the purposes of watering down coal dust as early as 1900 but only if a mine had “generated gas in dangerous quantities,” an assessment made not by the hand loaders exposed to it but by the mine superintendent whose primary responsibility was overseeing maximum productivity, not ensuring safe working conditions.
In this same period, the state’s governor, George Atkinson, was heard to say, “It is but the natural course of mining events that men should be injured or killed in accidents,” a laissez-faire attitude no doubt welcomed by his political allies in the industry. The few mine inspectors who were hired were almost without exception beholden to the owners for their positions. Any who sought to enforce what safety standards there were discovered that if legal action were initiated, the owners would be granted injunctive relief in local courts, which they also controlled (Corbin 1981, 16–17). Again and again, in reports of accidents causing death published in the Annual Report of the [West Virginia] Department of Mines, responsibility almost always was placed on the deceased miners.
In his description of the hand loader’s work, Tams also failed to address the implications for the ease and extent of production associated with the height of the particular coal seam to which a miner and his buddy were assigned. Figure 1.2 shows what can be recovered from a seam that appears to be as much as five or six feet thick. Working such a seam would be comparatively easy: miners could stand fully erect as they first prepared to blast coal from the face of the seam and then to shovel it into the mine cars. Not all seams were so accommodating. John McPhee described the rock sequences formed in the Carboniferous Period as “often striped like regimental ties” (McPhee 1998, 247) but, unlike the equal width of the stripes on a regimental tie, coal seams were not. A miner could find himself saddled with one as thin as two or three feet. Depending upon his size and strength, he might set about to get the coal out of the seam by working on his hands and knees, crawling through a narrow tunnel of his own creation.
Logically, one might imagine a miner blasting away not only the coal but the shale or sandstone above it in order to create a “room” big enough to permit him to work in greater comfort. But the solidity of the roof itself was uncertain, and anyway he was not being paid to mine shale or sandstone; he was paid to mine coal. Nat Reese, whose recollections of musical life in the coal camps was discussed in the introduction, said when referring to the expectations of the superintendent of one of the several mines in the southern coalfields in which he worked during the 1930s: “And he didn’t pay for no rock. The time that you took to load that rock and carry it outside and dump it, you didn’t get anything. You just got paid for the coal” (Kline 1987, 11).
The physical wear and tear of working in such confined spaces took a toll over months and years of work underground, along with the damage brought about by inhaling coal dust and other airborne pollutants common to underground mines. The miner’s job was not the neat and tidy occupation that William Purviance Tams led one to believe.
Economic and Other Benefits of Mining:
The Black Miners’ Perspective
The work of the hand loaders was carried out within the evolving economic conditions of the industry and of the nation in general. As discussed in the introduction, the NRA’s Bituminous Coal Code stabilized the industry, established minimum wages, and empowered the United Mine Workers of America to organize miners and engage in collective bargaining with the mine owners on their behalf. African American miners and their families enjoyed a share of this comparative prosperity thanks to the principle of equal work for equal pay that governed contacts between mine operators and the UMWA. White or black, a miner who hooked his brass check to the side of a mine car before loading it with the coal he and his buddy had just “shot” from the coal face was paid the same for his labor as any other miner employed in the same operation. Non-mechanized mining constituted piecework labor: one was paid by the tonnage dug out of the mine. Under such circumstances there was every incentive to be as productive as one was able. Indeed, one of the perceived merits of coal mining was the sense of control that such piecework labor afforded individual miners (Lewis 1989, 90–91).
David Corbin noted that, given the “physical structure of the coal mine—a honeycombed tunnel extending in all directions for miles under the earth,” the coal miner was “an isolated piece-worker” who saw his boss no more than once a day (Corbin 1981, 38). Absent direct supervision, hand loaders enjoyed a degree of freedom that was, in the words of Carter Goodrich writing in 1925, “unique in American industrial life” and “so utterly unlike the order and regimentation of a plant like [auto maker Henry] Ford’s that it is hard to believe the two are continuing to exist side by side” (Goodrich 1925, 92).
While this level of autonomy may have been enjoyed by black miners in the states adjacent to West Virginia—Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia—during the 1930s, an equal degree of prosperity was not. Unlike coal operators in the Mountain State, those elsewhere strenuously resisted any role for the UMWA as soon as they saw an advantage in doing so following the demise of the NRA. In eastern Kentucky not only coal operators but local government officials actively (and, in a number of instan
ces, violently) opposed collective bargaining. When compared to West Virginia, the consequences were lower wages and poorer working conditions for all miners regardless of race in that area (Thomas 1998, 93).
The Coal Field County Seats: The Sites of Engagements and the Residences of Those Who Booked Them
To move from the mines where their money was earned to the venues of dances at which miners and their families spent a portion of those earnings, we are in effect moving from hundreds of company towns (almost as many as the number of mines in operation) to the county seats in the coalfields. These communities in West Virginia, like their counterparts throughout the nation, were more than just the location of the courthouse; they were centers of commerce as well. Long before supermarkets and shopping malls dotted the landscape, these towns were magnets for the rural population of the vicinity. Welch, seat of McDowell County, was characterized by an anonymous contributor to West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State as “the trade center of the surrounding coalfields” (West Virginia Writers Project 1941, 476).
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 6
