I have no idea where I learned this — definitely not from Merle Travis’s recording, which I only heard much later. My guess is that I just heard it around, which is something a lot of people don’t seem to understand about the folk revival and folk music in general.

I came along late enough that I got most of my repertoire off records, especially because by my time very few kids my age were into this kind of music. But there was still lots of it around. There were guys playing banjos and guitars and even the occasional autoharp on the street in Harvard Square, and local coffeehouses, and when I became a wandering busker at age 18, I often wound up staying with other musicians, or hanging out with them in all sorts of places, and picked up a bunch of songs that way.

That included some current busker standards like “The Boxer,” which I think I learned before I even knew it was by Paul Simon, and certainly before I was aware of hearing his version — but also lots of folk/blues/bluegrass songs, things we all kind of knew by osmosis, like this one. I actually hadn’t thought about this one in a while, but last fall I did a tour of the Czech Republic and one of the gigs was with Jiří Míža, a local singer-guitarist who sings a bunch of those songs with Czech lyrics, including this one and “Deep River Blues.” So we did some of them together, trading verses and languages, and  I was reminded of how much fun this is to play.

It was one of the songs Travis wrote when records by “folk singers” like Josh White, Burl Ives, Richard Dyer-Bennett, and Susan Reed began selling in the 1940s. An A&R guy at Capitol records asked him to do a folk song album, and he responded that Ives and other people had already recorded all the folk songs — he was known for fancy guitar picking and upbeat hillbilly jazz like “Smoke, Smoke Smoke (That Cigarette)” and presumably thought he’d gotten past that kind of thing.  But the A&R guy said, “So, write some new ones,” and a gig was a gig, and he did. The results included this one, “Dark as a Dungeon,” “I Am a Pilgrim,”  and, most famously, “Sixteen Tons,” which was inspired by a couple of Josh White songs and became a huge hit for Tennessee Ernie Ford.

I eventually heard Travis’s version of this, but only sing a couple of his verses — he sang four, including one that was pretty generic and a final one about making his tombstone from “number nine coal,” a phrase that also turns up in “Sixteen Tons.” I just got curious and looked it up; apparently it refers to a particular seam of coal in Kentucky, where he grew up in a mining family.

My other verses are maybe from Mississippi John Hurt or Lead Belly? I’m not sure, but they’re from the general pool of mining and railroad songs, reaching back to work songs men sang to keep their hammers falling in unison. The guitar breaks are just what I ended up playing because I ended up doing this in E; if I did it in another key, I’d play something else, but this felt comfortable.