“Piney Mountains,” also called “Damned Old Piney Mountains,” was written by Craig Johnson, an old-time fiddler and songwriter who played with the Double Decker String Band. Johnson based the song on an old logger he met in the West Virginia mountains — a man who had once been a fiddler but had lost the fingers of his left hand in the timber.
The song tells that logger’s story. It follows a hard life spent felling timber in the piney mountains, and the accident that took a man’s music from him; the title’s curse on the mountains carries the bitterness of all the labor cost him.
The song was revived by the Appalachian Road Show, a band devoted to mountain music and its history.
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