Mickey Pick-Slate

DESCRIPTION: "There came to this country a short time ago A poor Irish widow from the county Mayo, She had but one son, his age it was eight, And the boss gave him work picking slate." He works hard, but falls down an hole and dies; his mother laments
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1938 (Korson-MinstrelsOfTheMinePatch)
KEYWORDS: mining work children death
FOUND IN:
REFERENCES (1 citation):
Korson-MinstrelsOfTheMinePatch, pp. 115-116, "Mickey Pick-Slate" (1 text)
NOTES [137 words]: Unlike most of the pieces in this part of Korson-MinstrelsOfTheMinePatch, Korson does not list an author; he seems to imply that it is traditional. So I've indexed it.
Child labor was of course common in the Pennsylvania mines, but the children were usually older than eight! Still, the song is accurate in describing most of the youngsters as slate-pickers. According to Kevin Kenny, Making Sense of the Molly Maguires, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 60, "Three thousand nine hundred and eighty boys worked in the mines of Schuylkill County in 1870; 886 (22 percent) of them worked below ground, in charge of mules and ventilation, and 3,094(78 percent) above ground, picking slate out of coal in the breaker." A footnote adds that 12,000 boys worked as slate pickers in the anthracite region as a whole in 1880. - RBW
Last updated in version 6.2
File: KMMP115

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