1921 was the year
Seems like yesterday to me
Let me tell you about what happened then
Back in the mine country
We were fightin' hard to build a union
'Cause at forty cents a ton
There was no way to feed a family
When the minin' day was done
The strike had lasted for a year
When they shot down Smilin' Sid
He was a lawman who stood up for us miners
That's the only crime he ever did
A hundred miners locked up with no trial
There in Mingo-town
But the last straw came in Sharples
When they gunned the women down
(Chorus)
We're marchin' on to Mingo
Ten thousand men and countin'
Here in the hills of West Virginia
At the Battle of Blair Mountain
We shouted through the hillsides
In every union hall
We're marchin' on to Mingo
Teach them a lesson, once and all
We commandeered every freight train
To the Kentucky line
Took every car that crossed our path
And all the guns and ammo we could find
The union leaders tried to stop us
Mother Jones told us to turn back
But we had learned ourselves from the gun thugs
There's a time to talk and a time to attack
We had no leader, we didn't need one
We all knew our way through Logan County
And we all knew once we got there
We're gonna hang Sheriff Chapin from a sour apple tree
(Chorus)
We dug trenches and wore helmets
That we brought from the Argonne
All the way from France to Logan
We fought from dusk to dawn
They dropped explosives from their airplanes
Such a thing you never saw
They shot us with machine guns
It was the operator's law
For three days and nights we fought them
the front was ten miles wide
Every cop and scab in West Virginia
Were there on the other side
President Harding sent in the Army
And we left our line to them
But the hills of West Virginia
Will long remember when
(Chorus)