“The Old Coal Mine” was recorded by Larry Sparks, the Ohio-born singer and guitarist whose lonesome, blues-edged voice has been a fixture of bluegrass since the 1960s. He included it on his 2007 album “The Last Suit You Wear.”
The song belongs to the long line of coal-mining songs in bluegrass and Appalachian music. Such songs return again and again to the mine as a place of danger, hard work, and hard memory, and “The Old Coal Mine” looks back at that world with the weariness and feeling that mark Sparks’s singing.
Sparks built much of his reputation on slow, mournful material, and the song suits that strength.
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