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Thursday, November 21, 2002

By John Hayes, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Nine Somerset coal miners were still trapped under 240 feet of rock when their story began to be documented in song. Ordinary people, some of whom had never written a song before, felt compelled to share the story in verse. The phenomenon grew as live, global media coverage showed a tense search becoming a triumphant rescue.

	Gerard Rohlf, like many others, has written a song about the Quecreek Mine entrapment. (Joyce Mendelsohn, Post-Gazette)
	Mining Songs Mark Weakland performs "Four Foot Seam" from the disc of mining songs and poetry "Gathering Place: Songs and Poems of Western Pennsylvania." (469K MP3) Here is the complete song. (3MB MP3) Gerard Rohlf performs "Nine Men Down: The Ballad of the Quecreek Miners." (466K MP3) Here is the complete song. (5MB MP3) Tracy Benzel performs "Quecreek Bucket." (469K MP3) Download MP3 players at: Real Player Windows Media Player WinAMP

For most of the songwriters, it wasn't about money or celebrity or publishing rights. They recognized an uplifting story and wanted to share the humanity. On cassette tapes, CDs and audio e-mail messages, they sent their songs to anyone who might be able to reach the miners and their families. The songs were intended as gifts, reminding them that they weren't going through the ordeal alone.

The majority of the Quecreek songs are folk ballads written and performed in the Woody Guthrie guitar tradition. Although most of the songs were taped on hand-held recorders or tracked live into personal computers, a few were produced in recording studios.

"This was a tragedy that turned into a triumph," says Gerard Rohlf, 51, an Edgewood singer-songwriter who sings with the St. Bede Church choir in Point Breeze and has been writing songs since he was 16. "If it had remained a tragedy, I probably wouldn't have written the song, because I'm a Pollyanna type. It's a modern miracle, and like most miracles, it takes the hands of humans to pull it off."

Rohlf says he referred to the Post-Gazette book "All Nine Alive!" to get the facts straight for his five-minute song, "Nine Men Down: The Ballad of the Quecreek Miners."

"It was hard to write," he says. "I felt honor-bound to those men, the people of Somerset, miners in general and myself to tell the truth."

Songwriter Mark Weakland and poet Mike Kane, both from the Johnstown area, were halfway through recording a musical and spoken-word collaboration about rural Western Pennsylvania when the wall broke at the Quecreek Mine. They titled their album "Gathering Place: Songs and Poems of Western Pennsylvania."

"Some of the songs were inspired by the Quecreek rescue," says Weakland, "but I felt awkward about being too specific, like people would think I was capitalizing on their ordeal. Although I hid it a little bit, they're in there."