Ghosts of West Virginia

Steve Earle is a songwriter with a gift for telling stories with his lyrics, and he's also a leftist populist who likes to sing of the lives and challenges of working people and how they often struggle against an economic system not meant to favor them. Once upon a time, that wasn't an unlikely combination for someone working in folk or country music, yet in an era where "country" is mostly a lifestyle brand and "folk" means just about anyone who plays an acoustic guitar rather than an electric, that makes him somewhat more unusual. Given his talents and inclinations, Earle was the ideal choice to write songs for Coal Country, a play written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen about the Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster, in which 27 West Virginia coal miners lost their lives in 2010. There is a certain irony that Earle created a song cycle about the real costs of being a blue-collar worker in America in the 21st century for an off-Broadway play staged by New York's Public Theater, where the