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about

Song of the Miners forms part of The Dark Store, an Arts Council-funded, hour-long radio ballad. It is a collection of spoken word and nine original folk songs, highlighting the significance of hidden labour and the lives of essential workers throughout history to the present day. Woven out of many threads, from historical texts to testimonies gathered during online writing sessions during lockdown, the stories told include that of a governess, the herring girls and miners, as well as contemporary supermarket and ‘dark store’ workers, a Glaswegian lorry driver, and NHS nurses in the pandemic. All of which have been worked into poetry, folk music and song by a collaboration of writer Charlotte Oliver and composer Sarah Dew.
The Dark Store provides a platform where voices are heard and invisibility is challenged, respect is promoted, and the creativity and spirit of those working in the dark is celebrated.

lyrics

Lyrics by Charlotte Oliver

Underneath green valleys, peaceful,
Stories buried of mining people
Way down deep in earth’s hot inside where
We laboured hard and too often died but

Fellow miners - we were like brothers,
Not for our own backs, we watched each others’,
Comrades in working, comrades in living,
Getting through hard times, sharing and giving.

Shaft wheels turned for generations,
Me and all my male relations,
Barely adult yet you went down to
Spend your life enclosed underground but

Fellow miners - we were like brothers,
Not for our own backs, we watched each others’,
Comrades in working, comrades in living,
Getting through hard times, sharing and giving.

Darkness and dust concealed us under layers,
Safety entrusted to family prayers and we
lived in the shadows
no work for a coward, in-
visible workers kept industry powered and

Through the streets, our pit boots clattered,
Coal-caked faces laughed and chattered,
fresh air lungfuls, relief all around now the
Danger’s over, homeward bound but

Fellow miners - we were like brothers,
Not for our own backs, we watched each others’,
Comrades in working, comrades in living,
Getting through hard times, sharing and giving.

credits


Lyrics: Charlotte Oliver
Music composed and produced by Sarah Dew
Vocals: Charlotte Oliver, Sarah Dew, John Watton, Rowan Oliver, Clare Shaw, Sally Lidgley, Jaye Lewis, Karen Chalmers, Pat Edmond, Nia Davidson
Trumpet: Arlo Oliver
Sounds from freesound.org :
‘gathering stone’ by qubodup
‘construction site pickhammer’ by ivolipa
‘rock-hammer-chisel’ by dheming
‘birds urban 5am’ by hudsomi1
‘footsteps on old cobblestones’ by arnaud-contancier

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about

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The Dark Store Scarborough, UK

Sarah Dew is a sound artist and composer whose audio installations have been commissioned and broadcast on radio stations including BBC, Canada and throughout the UK.
Charlotte Oliver is a poet who has been commissioned to write poetry by such varied institutions as the BBC and Scarborough’s South Cliff Gardens. Her work has been published in anthologies and journals throughout the world. ... more

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