Save us!

I'm sitting listening to the album "Struggle" by Woody Guthrie, it is a collection of political and union organizing songs. The album is on cassette and it is probably one of the oldest tapes I still own (It's not that old really, it's just that I chucked most of my tapes when CD's came in).

There is a song about dying miners that goes like this:

The Dying Miner

(By Woody Guthrie)

It happened an hour ago
Way down in this tunnel of coal;
This gas caught a fire from somebody's lamp,
And the miners are choking in smoke.

Goodbye to you, little Dicky;
Goodbye to my wife that I love,
Most of these miners won't be coming home,
Tonight when the work whistle blows.

(It) looks like the end for me
And for all of my buddies I see;
We're all writing letters on state rock walls,
Please carry my word to my wife.

I found a little place in the air,
I crawled and I drug myself here,
But the smoke's getting bad and the fumes coming in,
This coal gas is burning my eyes.

I found myself taking the tape out and looking at it. I had forgotten about this song and it immediately made me think about the Sago mine disaster of a few weeks ago when 12 miners died from carbon monoxide poisoning. They left notes for their families too.

It seems so strange that Woody Guthrie wrote that song in 1947 and here we are still dealing with the same pointless deaths. I guess the miners will only stop dying once the fossil fuels and fossil jewels have all run out…

On a connected but slightly different thread, I then thought about other mining disaster songs; "The Blantyre Explosion" and “The Springhill Mine Disaster”, both written by Ewan McColl. I know them as being performed by Christy Moore and The Dubliners and they were staples of my “Folk’n World” mix tapes that I used to give people.

Mix tapes were a thing of beauty and I think I probably spent an unhealthy portion of my teenage years making them. I taped bits of dialog off the TV and spliced songs together, I cut songs off at a particular beat to try to make them join seemlessly onto the next one (God, this was so hard back then! It's so easy now! Has the computer spoiled the enjoyment of achievement for everything?).

I basically managed to drown out all the years of my Mum watching Last of the Summer Wine and Dad's Army repeats by fading Prince songs into Jimi Hendrix guitar solos. A great tape was when you couldn't tell where one song ended and the next began!

Now, there are plenty of websites on the art of mixtaping so I'm not going to waffle about this. I want to look at the tapes themselves.

When was the last time you picked one of these things up?

It’s such a small miracle of design that lasts surprisingly well as long as you don’t step on them! They were also, potentially, a disaster waiting to happen!

Remember all those times your favorite tape got eaten by the machine? You could spend an hour untangling the web of ferric spaghetti desperately trying not to stretch it! You could then spend another 45 minutes using a biro pen winding the tape back into the case praying that you wouldn’t end up with a twist in it and have to start all over again!

I don’t know why but this image inspires some fuzzy warm comfy nostalgia trip! A vision of a time when life was a bit slower and you were forced to stop and deal with things.

There are apparently people out there who collect different brands of blank cassettes, check out this guy! There is no point to his website aprt from storing images of all the blank tapes he owns - most of them still in their orginal wrappers!! I even found myself looking for a specific type of tape that my Brother used. Remember these Brother J?

The orange and black BASF tape was a staple in our house for years! It's a strange world eh?