Comments About 16 Tons

@cathyleegrantham-schreifel7269

Written by Merle Davis, sung by the incredibly talented Tennessee Ernie Ford in 1956, the song tells the story of coal miners back in the day who, instead of getting a paycheck, were given a voucher for use at the company store. The rent for their company-provided houses also came out of their pay. They were never handed a check to choose how they wanted to spend their hard-earned pay, therefore they couldn’t even afford to die...”they owed their souls to the company store”. Just hearing the song produces sad images of hardship and struggle like few of us have ever known in this country, thanks to the men who went down into the mines under extremely harsh and dangerous conditions in order for this country us to have luxuries we all enjoyed then and now.

@ShiftingDrifter

This is just a timeless piece of work! Whoever decided on the studio arrangement was brilliant for keeping the song stripped down to only the bare essentials with Ernie Ford's great voice selling the melody. It might have ended up just another soft-pop 50s song soon forgotten, but instead of loading it down with too much instrumental work, the song's hook is only 8 simple notes comprised of a flute, clarinet, and oboe, and then a snare with brushes and upright bass lightly carrying Ford's amazing baritone/mezzo-bass voice with snapping fingers for the upbeat. I read that the finger snapping was just something Ford did while warming up for the song and was added in when the president for capital records heard it and told the studio producer, "Keep his snapping fingers!" And so they did. No one ever predicted its success and made it B side. The song sold a million copies in 21 days - incredible for those years.

@76629online

I can still remember my great grandmother playing this song on a record player in her house in the early 1970s. She was from West Virginia. Half of her family died in coal mines.