Springhill Mine Disaster

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Tags: 1956 Springhill Mine Disaster

Lyrics

Listen friends to my story
It’s sad but it’s true
Some hundred men went down the mine
Who were just like me and you

There came a violent upheaval
Many hundred feet below
It was a tragic sight to see
How these poor men did go

It was on the first of November
When eyes with tears did fill
Disaster hit the number four
In the mining town of Springhill

Volunteers and Draeger’s crews
Struggled on in vain
Through gas and broken timbers
But death was there the same

Trying to reach their companions
Away down in the mine
Eighty-eight were rescued
With twenty-six left behind

Men with courage and nerves of steel
Deadly gas waiting to kill
The worst disaster in many a year
In the mining town of Springhill

Source: Rosenberg, Neil V. 2000. The Springhill Mine Disaster Songs: Class, Memory, and Persistence in Canadian Folksong. In Northeast Folklore: Essays in Honor of Edward D. Ives, ed. Pauleena MacDougall and David Taylor, 153-87. Orono, ME: University of Maine Press & Maine Folklife Center.

One response to “Springhill Mine Disaster”

1992 Westray | Disaster SongsDisaster Songs says:

October 29, 2013 at 11:34 pm

[…] monoxide it created quickly killed the 26 miners working in the mine at the time of the blast.[5][6] The levels of carbon monoxide and methane would have built up quickly and significantly after the […]

Reply

by Eddie LeGere

LeGere was born in 1930 in the small town of Joggins, near Springhill. The son of a coal miner, he took a turn himself in the mines for almost two years but didn’t like it. His family moved to Toronto when he was 14, about the same time that he started becoming involved in music.

By 1966, the year that this song was released, he had written over 80 songs and had appeared on Main St. Jamboree, CHCH-TV, and CKSO (Channel 5 in Sudbury, ON). He had a four album contract with Arc Records in the 1960s and later released a fifth independent album. He later wound up in St Catharines, ON where he became friends with Jack Kingston, composer of “Miracle at Colliery Two” and “Springhill Mine Explosion,” later in life.

LeGere was living in Dundas, ON (near Hamilton) at the time of the disaster and watched events unfold on TV. His brother-in-law died in it.

Sources:

Cox, Terrance. 2000. Jack Kingston: “How Far is He Now”? Downtowner 16/4.

Rosenberg, Neil V. 2000. The Springhill Mine Disaster Songs: Class, Memory, and Persistence in Canadian Folksong. In Northeast Folklore: Essays in Honor of Edward D. Ives, ed. Pauleena MacDougall and David Taylor, 153-87. Orono, ME: University of Maine Press & Maine Folklife Center.

See also: LeGere, Eddie, A Bluenose Songbook (1996, Arc AS 702).