Moving Mountains: Voices of Appalachia Rise Up Against Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining

Andrew McKnight introduces his song "Company Town" for a recent concert finale along with Michael DeLalla, Cherylann Hawk, and Joan and Keith Pitzer

Artists and coalfields residents basking in the post concert glow at Shepherd University; from L to R Joan Pitzer, Patty Sebok, Keith Pitzer, Julia Bonds, Andrew McKnight, Larry Gibson, Michael DeLalla, and Cherylann Hawk

From L to R, Appalachian Voices Executive Director and songwriter Mary Anne Hitt, singer/songwriters Andrew McKnight, Joan and Keith Pitzer share the stage at the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough TN

Past Moving Mountains Events

Our partners at Appalachian Voices brought the Moving Mountains roadshow to the southern Appalachians in November 2004 for events in Blacksburg VA, Appalachian State University in Boone NC and the International Storytelling Center in Jonesborough TN as well as an hour long appearance on WETS 89.5FM "Live at Studio One" from East Tennessee State University. The concerts featured 3 of the artists featured on the recording: Andrew McKnight, Keith & Joan Pitzer, and Mary Anne and Than Hitt as well as a powerful 15-minute multimedia presentation.

We were honored to be part of a big evening at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown WV on July 21st, with musical performances from Andrew McKnight, Keith & Joan Pitzer, and Cherylann Hawk as well as a powerful slide show and lecture by coalfields activist and 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize honoree Julia "Judy" Bonds. Reynolds Hall was filled with coalfields residents weary from all-day bus rides, but the music and the camaraderie seemed to energize everyone as well as raise some much needed money for displaced and threatened communities.

In Washington DC on May 24th, 2004 , we celebrated the release of Moving Mountains at the Institute of Musical Traditions concert series. In addition to Falling Mountaineers Keith & Joan Pitzer and Andrew McKnight, other artists appearing included Cherylann Hawk, T. Paige Dalporto and the CD's producer, Jen Osha.

Prior to the DC concert event, Falling Mountain founder Michael DeLalla and Andrew McKnight talked about the CD and release concert on Washington DC's NPR station, WAMU 88.5 FM, on their "Metro Connection" show, which you can hear on the show's website archives. They perform Andrew's song "Company Town" live as well as play a track from the CD, "Underneath a Blackened Moon" by Keith & Joan Pitzer.

From John Mitchell's excellent, thorough and deeply disturbing National Geographic article, here is an excerpt:

Coal brought people to Marfork Hollow in the Appalachian Mountains of southern West Virginia. And it was coal, or rather a different way of mining it, that finally drove the people away. The last to leave was Judy Bonds.

A coal miner's daughter whose roots here go back eight generations, Bonds packed up her family and fled when she could no longer tolerate the blasting that rattled her windows, the coal soot that she suspected was clotting her grandson's lungs, and the blackwater spills that bellied-up fish in a nearby stream. Retreating to the town of Rock Creek, a few miles downstream, Bonds joined Coal River Mountain Watch, a citizens group determined to oppose surface-mining abuses.

In the years since Bonds moved, coal companies have turned to an even more aggressive mining process known as mountaintop removal. After clear-cutting a peak's forest, miners shatter its rock with high explosives. Then they scoop up the rubble in giant draglines and dump the overburden, as they call it, into a conveniently located hollow, or valley. The method was first tested in Kentucky and West Virginia in the late 1970s and has since spread to parts of Tennessee and Virginia.

"What the coal companies are doing to us and our mountains," said Bonds when she and I first met years ago, "is the best kept dirty little secret in America."

Now the secret is out. Coal companies have obliterated the summits of scores of mountains scattered throughout Appalachia, and more and more folks like Judy Bonds are decrying the environmental and social fallout of what some refer to as strip mining on steroids.

Not only is mountain topping less labor intensive than underground mining, it is also more efficient and profitable than the older form of surface mining, in which the operator stripped away the horizontal contours of a mountainside as one might peel an apple. So fast has the practice spread that there's no accurate accounting of the area affected, but surface mining in general has impacted more than 400,000 acres (160,000 hectares) in this four-state Appalachian region, including more than 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) of streambeds. If the practice continues until 2012, it will have squashed a piece of the American earth larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The "valley fills" (the resulting dirt, topsoil, vegetation, rocks and destroyed trees dumped into the valleys and streams nearby) have buried forever over 1,000 miles of rivers and streams in West Virginia alone. As a result, catastrophic flooding has become all too familiar downstream of mined areas. Massive slurry ponds filled with coal sludge are held back by earthen dams, which occasionally fail, as happened in 2000 when 150 million gallons of coal sludge broke loose and fouled streams all the way down into the Ohio River as far as Cincinnati. Miraculously no deaths resulted, but these time bombs are ticking even as more are planted all over these areas.

Local people have led the long and difficult battle in the courts and the media against large corporations and mining organizations in a state desperate to maintain its resource extraction economy. Citizen activist, housewife, mother, and coal miner's daughter Judy Bonds has led the efforts to stop MTR in southern West Virginia where her family has lived for generations; for her tireless efforts to save her community and others, she was awarded the prestigious 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize.

Moving Mountains was compiled by lifelong musician and activist Jen Osha, who first heard coalfield residents speak about the impact of MTR in their communities during her graduate work in Forestry at Yale. A Mountain State resident, Osha has devoted much of her time to harnessing the healing and storytelling power of music to help coalfield communities end the legal practice of MTR. "My family is very proud of its mining heritage. The men in my family have been miners back through to the early 1800s when my ancestors came from Germany. I am the first generation to be raised outside of the coalfields."

"It inspires me to see that so many musicians donated their work, so that they could use music as activists used it during the depression, during the Civil Rights Movement, during Vietnam. Not just to pay the bills...to inspire and create change," says Osha. "In the last year and a half, there have been a lot of difficult events in the coalfields: the closing of the last school in Coal River, the increase of the limits on coal trucks. Judge Haden's ruling being overturned...again. But what I saw was that people hung on to this music. It was something hopeful in a pretty dark time."

Falling Mountain is proud to stand with these families and communities, and we are particularly honored to have tracks from two of our artists included on the CD. Singer/songwriter, poet and activist Andrew McKnight contributes the lead track "Company Town" from his latest CD Turning Pages, while West Virginians Keith & Joan Pitzer from the Cheat River Valley penned "Underneath a Blackened Moon" especially for this project.

Moving Mountains is the biggest selling Falling Mountain title ever. You can enjoy some great music while helping Appalachian communities affected by MTR by picking up your copy of Moving Mountains at the Falling Mountain Online Store. Most of the proceeds from sales of Moving Mountains go to non-profit organizations helping mining communities threatened or destroyed by MTR, including the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition and Coal River Mountain Watch.