“The Dream of the Miner’s Child” is a sentimental coal-country song that traces back to a British music-hall number, “Don’t Go Down in the Mine, Dad,” written by Robert Donnelly and Will Geddes and published in London around 1910. The blind Atlanta evangelist and songwriter Andrew Jenkins reworked that material into the version known in American tradition, built around a child’s prophetic dream.
The song reached records in 1925, when Vernon Dalhart recorded it. One of the era’s best-selling country acts, Dalhart cut the number repeatedly over the following years. In the lyric, a miner’s child wakes from a nightmare of disaster underground and pleads with the father not to report to work that day, a plea framed against the constant danger of the mines.
The song became one of the most enduring of all mining ballads, passing into the old-time and bluegrass repertoires through recordings by artists such as Woody Guthrie and Ralph Stanley.
