“Sixteen Tons” is a song written by Merle Travis, the Kentucky guitarist and songwriter, in 1946. Asked by his record label for some “folk-sounding” songs on short notice, Travis drew on the coal-mining country of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, where his own father had worked the mines, and wrote it in a single night.
The lyric is a bitter, weary portrait of a coal miner’s life — the back-breaking labor of loading sixteen tons of coal, and the trap of the company-store system, in which a miner could end a day of work owing more than he earned. Its grim refrain about owing one’s soul to the company store became one of the most quoted lines in American song.
The song became a worldwide hit in a 1955 recording by Tennessee Ernie Ford and has been sung ever since across country, folk, and bluegrass.
