I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

Oh yeah, I would have been a coal miner, I would think, if I hadn't had tuberculosis when I was 12.

We come from a tough, working class background, so we're very tight.

They are closing the mine in two weeks, they say. Six days a week bumping down in the gondola, pecking out the rocks and hauling them back up, doing it again the next day for twenty-seven years, one cave-in, three thin raises, and a failed strike. Where am I going to go every day, what am I going to do with all that sunshine?

And I said, 'A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?' And he said, 'Because when he sings ... even the birds stop to listen.

We've come a long, long way. We haven't killed a coal miner in a state of Illinois coal mine for two consecutive years.