“Dream of the Miner’s Child” (also “Dream of a Miner’s Child”) is the American form of an English song, “Don’t Go Down in the Mine, Dad,” subtitled “A Little Child’s Dream.” Robert Donnelly wrote the words and Will Geddes the music, and the Lawrence Wright Music Company of London published it around 1910. Wright is said to have heard a street singer performing it and bought the rights. He published it some weeks after the 1910 explosion at the Wellington Pit in Whitehaven, Cumberland, in which 136 men died, and the song reportedly sold a million copies.
In America it reached records in 1925. Vernon Dalhart recorded “Dream of a Miner’s Child” on 20 October 1925, and Victor issued it that December on 19821, backed with “The Death of Floyd Collins.” The label credited both sides to Andrew Jenkins, the Atlanta preacher and songwriter, partially blind from infancy, whose event songs such as “The Death of Floyd Collins” passed into tradition. Victor’s credit notwithstanding, later bluegrass records have also named Donnelly and Geddes as the writers, or listed the song as public domain.
The lyric is a premonition. A miner leaving for work hears his little girl scream; she has dreamed that the mines were “flaming with fire,” with the men fighting for their lives and the mouth of the mine crowded with sweethearts and wives, and she throws her arms round his neck and begs him not to go down that day, because dreams so often come true.
The Stanley Brothers sang it on stage in the early 1960s: live tapes from Glen Echo in March 1962 and from a Friends of Old Time Music concert at New York University in November 1962 were issued years later. Bill Clifton recorded it for Starday in August 1963, Doc Watson included it on Doc Watson & Son (Vanguard, 1965), and Ralph Stanley cut it in Lexington, Kentucky, in March 1978 for Down Where the River Bends. The Johnson Mountain Boys’ version was taped at their February 1988 concert at Lucketts, Virginia. Outside bluegrass, Phyllis Boyens sang it in the 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA.
