“Blue Diamond Mines” was written by Jean Ritchie, the Kentucky-born singer who carried the songs of her Cumberland Mountain family into the folk revival. It is one of several coal-mining songs she wrote, and like the others she first credited it to a pseudonym, “Than Hall” — partly to shield her mother, and partly from a sense that such songs would be taken more seriously coming from a man.
The song is a miner’s lament for a vanished way of life: the closing of the mines, the falling wages, the company towns emptied out, set against the remembered camaraderie of the work. Ritchie recorded it herself in the early 1970s, and it became one of her most enduring compositions.
The Johnson Mountain Boys recorded “Blue Diamond Mines” on their 1993 album Blue Diamond, and Kathy Mattea and others have since taken it up — carrying a song of Appalachian hardship into the bluegrass repertoire that grew from the same mountains.
