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The NewLanders Born of Fire: Songs of Steel and Industry The NewLanders are a group of Pittsburgh area musicians and songwriters who have researched and rediscovered songs written by, and about, the people of southwestern Pennsylvania. By forging these old tunes in their own style, the Newlanders have created a new sound -- while honoring and preserving the spirit of this region's rich past. The CD contains eleven songs born of the steel and coal industry in southwestern Pennsylvania between 1845 and 1945. They are the songs the men and women of the steel era sang and which tell, in their own words, the story of their lives. Their story is one of struggle, hard work, defiance, pride, and survival. Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Doug Wilkin at Wilkin Audio About the Songs Twenty-Inch Mill The lyrics of this song were passed between rolling-mill men for decades before they were published in the April 26, 1894 issue of the National Labor Tribune. Pittsburgh steelworkers created the ballad. It's a proud anthem to Carnegie's twenty-inch mill on Thirty-Third Street, which produced the first Pittsburgh-rolled beams around 1870. Celebrated Working Man Miner minstrel Ed Foley composed this song in 1892 after listening to an off-hours miner brag about how he could 'cut more coal than any man from Pittsburgh to New York.' RJ Heid: Drums, Les Getchel: Bodhran Where the Old Allegheny and Monongahela Flow There is some question as to where this song originated, but it was a very popular tune in Pittsburgh around 1910. The Smoky City Quartet sang it in four-part harmony, and impromptu versions could be heard in the pubs around Sarah Street on the South Side. It is reminiscent of Pittsburgh in a bygone era, but this ode to Pittsburgh still touches those of us who love 'the city that is built among the hills.' RJ Heid: Drums The Altoona Freight Wreck (Fred Tait-Douglas, Carson Robison) This song was found in a collection titled, Scalded to Death by the Steam, Authentic Stories of Railroad Disasters and the Ballads that Were Written About Them by Katie Letcher Lyle. The wreck occurred on November 29, 1925. Freight No. 1262 was hauling fifty-eight freight cars, running east from Kittanning Point, at the topmost spot on the Horseshoe Curve. The engineer lost brake power as the tracks followed a sharp descent for five miles down the mountainside. Picking up speed all along the way, the train finally smashed into the Altoona train yard, sending bystanders leaping for safety. Two men were killed in the accident and five thousand spectators came to view the wreckage. Vernon Dalhart originally recorded the song in January 1926. RJ Heid: Drums, Dan Kaplan: Harmonica Draglines (Deborah Silverstein) Johnstown native Deborah Silverstein wrote Draglines in the late 70's, when she was living in Boston and performing with five other women in a leftist/feminist string band called 'New Harmony Sisterhood.' On a visit home she was on a drive with her younger sister in the area near Coalport when she saw strip mining for the first time. She writes: As I was already immersed in a world of leftist politics, it wasn't hard for me to create the storyline for the song. People responded with great intensity to Draglines from the very beginning and the song has gone on to have a life of it's own, traveling around the world and still, occasionally, returning back to me in interesting ways. It's been recorded, among others, by Peggy Seeger, Guy and Candy Carawan and Delores Keene, and The Reel World String Band. Nathan Santos: Acoustic Bass Spike Crain (Gerard Rohlf) When the band first saw the paintings in the Born of Fire collection, they immediately thought of a song written by NewLander Gerard Rohlf. Several paintings depicted the tough little tug boats that push the coal barges up and down Pittsburgh's waterways.Gerard Rohlf remembers: I wrote the song in 1972 while I was working with Henry Koerner, a renowned artist and instructor at the Art Institute of
