Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of the George Sharp Davis of Perry, Kentucky
On a cool October day in 1937, a coal cutter from Hazard walked into a temporary studio and sang “The Harlan County Blues” for Alan Lomax. On the disc label he was just “George Davis.” In Perry, Leslie, and Harlan counties he was already becoming something else: the Singing Miner, the man whose guitar and radio show carried miners’ jokes and grievances from one hollow to the next.
George Sharp Davis spent most of his life as a working miner and small town radio personality. His songs, especially “Harlan County Blues,” “When Kentucky Had No Union Men,” “Coal Miner’s Boogie,” and “Death of the Blue Eagle,” are now some of the clearest musical documents we have of organizing and everyday life in the central Appalachian coalfields from the 1930s through the 1960s.
LaFollette To First Creek: Sorting Out The Birthplace
Vital records and music folklore do not quite agree on how to list his birth. Tennessee state birth registrations and a compiled FamilySearch profile place George Sharp Davis’s birth in LaFollette, Campbell County, Tennessee, in August 1904, to a large family that soon knew both poverty and early loss. Commercial music references, including discographies and encyclopedia style entries, usually repeat a later version that gives 19 August 1906 and sometimes relocates his birthplace to Hazard, Kentucky.
The Folkways liner notes written by John Cohen for When Kentucky Had No Union Men add family detail that lines up more closely with the Tennessee born 1904 date. Cohen describes Davis as the youngest of nine children whose father died when George was two. Before he ever saw the inside of a coal mine he worked in a Campbell County pressing shop for three dollars a week and cranked a movie projector by hand in the evenings.
At about thirteen and a half, Cohen writes, George left home with a new pair of pants from an older brother and headed for eastern Kentucky. On 1 January 1920 he went to work for the Crawford Coal Company at First Creek near Hazard and soon brought his mother north as well. Census entries through the 1920s and 1930s find a George S. or George Sharp Davis in the coalfields of southeastern Kentucky, reinforcing the picture that emerges from his own later recollections and from union song collectors.
Whatever exact date sits on his birth certificate, the basic outline is clear. He was born in the Cumberland foothills of Tennessee in the first years of the twentieth century, orphaned young, and came of age as a teenage breadwinner in the mines and small towns around Hazard.
A Coal Cutter In Organizing Time
From 1920 through the late 1940s George Davis worked underground in a series of eastern Kentucky operations. The Folkways notes and a later WSGS tribute agree that he did just about every job in a room and pillar mine: digging, loading, and eventually running a coal cutting machine. He spent seven years with the Algoma Block Company and fourteen years at Glowmar, east of Hazard, making a total of about twenty eight mining years before he finally hung up his mining tools.
Those years overlapped a stormy chapter in Appalachian labor history. Around 1933 the United Mine Workers of America began another big push to organize eastern Kentucky. Davis picked up a guitar that same year. According to Cohen, he learned to play just as union sound trucks and gun thugs were meeting on mountain roads, and he practiced on his front porch while miners gathered along the tracks outside his house to listen.
In October 1933 his mining job nearly ended everything. A serious accident mangled his left arm. After months in casts and even a bone graft, he found he could not make full chords on the guitar anymore. Instead of quitting he taught himself to fret one chord shape at a time and leaned harder into lyrics. The notes describe him realizing that he would never be a flashy picker, but that his songs about the mines and union problems meant enough to fellow miners that he could win Labor Day contests with them.
That combination of injury, union organizing, and a stubborn will to keep singing is the biographical core of almost everything he did afterward.
“The Harlan County Blues”: Lomax And The Library Of Congress
The first time we can hear George Davis clearly is in a field recording session on 17 October 1937, when Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded him at Hazard for the Library of Congress. The Lomax Digital Archive lists “The Harlan County Blues (part 2)” from that date, with Davis identified as performer in the Perry County session labeled “Hazard 10/37.”
“Harlan County Blues” is not a broadside in the usual sense but a tightly focused song about roadblocks, jails, and the danger of being a union man in a county where mine operators tried to seal the borders. Cohen later explained that the song is voiced by someone who stayed in Perry County during the early organizing drives and watched as Harlan officials set up roadblocks to keep organizers out and threw them in jail when they slipped through.
Within a few years another major collector arrived. In March 1940, while Davis was working at Glowmar, labor folklorist George Korson visited him for the research that became Coal Dust on the Fiddle. Three Davis songs made it into Korson’s book and onto the Library of Congress album Songs and Ballads of the Bituminous Miners, along with a short biographical sketch. Those pieces, together with the Lomax disc, are rare examples of coalfield songs recorded while the miners who wrote and sang them were still in the thick of conflict.
Later anthologies have kept those recordings in circulation. “The Harlan County Blues” and “Death of the Blue Eagle” appear on Mountain Music of Kentucky and Classic Mountain Songs from Smithsonian Folkways, which frame Davis’s performances as central documents in the mountain labor song tradition.
“Death of the Blue Eagle,” in particular, has drawn attention from historians of the New Deal. Modern song commentaries point out that it mourns the end of the National Recovery Administration, whose blue eagle emblem gave the song its title and whose codes many miners saw as an early federal promise of fairer wages and hours before the act was struck down.
Coal Miner’s Boogie And When Kentucky Had No Union Men
Davis’s first commercial disc came after decades of mining and a few years as a radio performer. In 1949 he recorded “Coal Miner’s Boogie” and “When Kentucky Had No Union Men” for Rich R Tone Records as catalog number 453. The record credited him simply as “The Singing Miner.”
Those two sides pack much of his worldview into a single shellac disc. “Coal Miner’s Boogie” combines an upbeat boogie rhythm with lyrics about frozen union cards, mine layoffs, and the dream of steady work that does not quite arrive. “When Kentucky Had No Union Men” is more bluntly autobiographical. Cohen notes that it tells how Davis “wandered around, nearly lost my mind” before getting a job in a nonunion mine, then celebrates UMWA organizing and John L. Lewis for delivering shorter hours and a chance for a miner’s children to actually know their father.
Davis later said he never received royalties from Rich R Tone, and the bad taste of that experience made him wary of the record business for years. Even so, “Coal Miner’s Boogie” lived on as a cult favorite. The two CD anthology Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields reissued it in 2007, placing Davis beside figures like Sarah Ogan Gunning, Jean Ritchie, and Hazel Dickens.
In November 1966 John Cohen convinced him to record again. Over two days at WKIC in Hazard they cut the material that became the 1967 Folkways LP When Kentucky Had No Union Men. The album features eighteen of Davis’s compositions, from “Little Lump of Coal” and “The Three Day Blues” to “Sixteen Tons” and “Buggerman in the Bushes,” with Marion Sumner adding fiddle and second guitar on several tracks.
Cohen’s liner essay treats the record as both a portrait of a single singer and a documentary of local attitudes toward work, union politics, welfare plans, and the dangers of mechanized mining in and around Hazard. He argues that, unlike topical songs written from a distance, Davis’s pieces are “the most accurate type of document we can have” because they reflect how miners themselves understood events.
Sixteen Tons: A Disputed Song In The Labor Lore
Any discussion of George Davis eventually runs into his claim on “Sixteen Tons.” In the Folkways notes Cohen reports that Davis told him he had composed a song about working nine or ten tons, which later became “Sixteen Tons,” in the 1930s and believed that Merle Travis and popular recordings by Tennessee Ernie Ford borrowed from his work by changing the chords and refining the lyrics.
On the Folkways LP Davis performs his own version under the title “Sixteen Tons,” with verses that echo the familiar story of a miner whose soul is tied up in company store debt. The melody and many lines resemble Travis’s copyrighted song, but Davis’s version leans even more heavily into local detail, and he treats it as part of his long run of coalfield compositions.
Most reference works, however, continue to credit “Sixteen Tons” to Merle Travis, who copyrighted and recorded it in the mid 1940s. Studies of the song’s history acknowledge Davis’s later authorship claim, usually citing Cohen’s notes and Alessandro Portelli’s discussion in They Say in Harlan County, but they tend to treat it as part of the contested storytelling that often surrounds famous labor songs rather than as settled fact.
For historians of Appalachian music, that disagreement is less important than what it reveals. The existence of Davis’s version shows how certain images and phrases about coal camp life were circulating among miners well before any of them reached the national charts, and it underscores the way local singers sometimes saw their own work overshadowed when Nashville or Hollywood picked up similar material.
“I Never Do Brag, I Never Do Boast”: The Radio Years
If you talk to people who grew up within reach of Hazard’s airwaves between the late 1940s and late 1960s, they often remember the Singing Miner before they remember any individual record. A long tribute from WKIC and WSGS sketches just how central he was to their programming. George Davis started at WKIC with one sustaining show in 1947 and soon expanded to a string of fifteen minute programs sponsored by local businesses. At one point he was on the air five times a day.
His theme song opened with a line listeners still quote: “I never do brag, I never do boast, I sing my songs from coast to coast, I am the Singing Miner on WKIC.” The WSGS page remembers him as one of the station’s most popular personalities, somebody whose live shows drew crowds to the studio windows and to remote broadcasts at schools and theaters around the mountains.
Cohen’s account shows how far that work stretched. In the early 1950s Davis was doing live or transcribed shows not only in Hazard but at WLSI in Pikeville, WSIP in Paintsville, and WCTW in Whitesburg, sometimes driving three hundred mountain miles a day to keep multiple daily time slots going. He also served as master of ceremonies for traveling Grand Ole Opry style packages and even shared a bill with Hank Williams and Sam McGee in Louisville.
Listener reminiscences collected by WKIC and WSGS add local color. One recalls a prosecutor asking a witness in a murder trial what time a crime occurred, only to get the answer that it happened when the Singing Miner “was just going off the radio.” Another remembers a prank in which a fellow announcer released a live chicken in the studio while Davis was singing, forcing him to keep a straight voice on air while chaos erupted around him. Many remember specific songs: “Boogerman in the Bushes,” safety warnings about racing trains to crossings, jingles about patent medicines and cabbage juice.
These stories capture what Cohen meant when he described Davis as a kind of modern minstrel using the new medium of radio to deliver news and commentary in song form to a tightly knit region.
London, Kentucky, And The Last Years
While his record catalog is relatively small, the paper trail around his later years is thick with small notices. World War II draft registration cards and Social Security records place him in Kentucky coal country through the 1940s. Kentucky death indexes and a GenealogyBank obituary record a George Sharp or George S. Davis, known as “the Singing Miner,” dying in London, Laurel County, Kentucky, in early November 1992 at about eighty eight years old.
The WSGS memorial, written from the perspective of colleagues and listeners, simply says that he retired from broadcasting in 1969 and “lived out his life in London, Kentucky,” dying in 1992 at age eighty eight. It notes that the Martin D 28 guitar he played from 1947 until his death would be displayed at the station’s new Main Street studios in Hazard as a tribute.
There is some disagreement in the exact date of death, with music databases following Wikipedia and MusicBrainz in giving 11 November and genealogical compilations pointing to 3 November. Either way, the dates line up with the memory of a man who came of age before the First World War and stayed on the air long enough to see television arrive in the mountains.
Beyond The Singing Miner: Scholarship And Memory
For a long time George Davis floated in footnotes, mentioned as “the Singing Miner of Hazard” in articles about labor music or in liner notes for various anthologies. That has changed as scholars and curators have paid closer attention to coalfield recordings.
Archie Green’s landmark study Only a Miner devotes space to Davis’s recordings and treats him as one of the key voices in the recorded coal song tradition, especially for pieces like “Harlan County Blues” and “Death of the Blue Eagle.” Alessandro Portelli draws on Davis’s songs and biography in They Say in Harlan County, using “Harlan County Blues” alongside oral interviews to explore how miners remembered violence and roadblocks in union fights.
The Appalachian State University research guide “Protest Songs of the Appalachian Coalfields” points students straight to When Kentucky Had No Union Men as a central primary source for coalfield protest music. Modern projects like Blair Pathways and Music of Coal use Davis’s songs, or new performances of them, to connect the Harlan story to the broader history of labor uprisings in Appalachia.
Radio Bristol’s “Pick 5” feature on coal mining songs highlights Davis’s recordings and emphasizes that his work caught not only strikes and disasters but also the camaraderie and humor of coal towns. A bibliographic survey from the West Virginia and Regional History Center lists Alf Valle’s article “George Davis: Beyond the Singing Miner” in Southern Folklore, one of the few extended scholarly studies devoted entirely to his life and work.
Taken together, these materials confirm what his neighbors in Hazard and London already knew. George Sharp Davis was not a star in the Nashville sense, but he was a working miner who turned his injuries, grievances, and daily observations into songs that traveled on radio waves and vinyl records. For historians of Appalachia, those songs are as valuable as any census page or company ledger. They capture how miners in Perry and Harlan counties talked about roadblocks, blacklists, welfare plans, and the weird mix of fear and pride that came with crawling into a low coal seam.
Hearing George Davis Today
For readers of AppalachianHistorian.org, George Davis offers a way to hear the coal wars and postwar mechanization through the voice of someone who loaded coal, ran a cutting machine, sat through union meetings, and then walked into a studio to sing about all three. His Library of Congress recordings, Korson’s bituminous miners collection, the Rich R Tone single, and the Folkways LP When Kentucky Had No Union Men together form a kind of musical life history of eastern Kentucky coal from the 1920s through the 1960s.
The genealogy records and Kentucky death indexes pin his life to specific places: LaFollette and Campbell County in his early years, the camps and streets around Hazard for his working and radio years, and finally London in Laurel County for retirement and burial. The field recordings, commercial discs, and radio recollections fill those dates with sound.
In the end, it may not matter whether you put 1904 or 1906 in parentheses after his name. What matters is that when Kentucky had no union men, and when it did, George Davis stood on porches, in union halls, and behind a radio microphone, turning the stories of coal camps into songs that miners recognized as their own.
Sources & Further Reading
FamilySearch. “George Sharp Davis (1904–1992).” FamilySearch Family Tree. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/L2ZW-VMW
Davis, George. “The Harlan County Blues (part 2).” Recorded October 17, 1937, Hazard, Kentucky. Alan and Elizabeth Lomax Kentucky Collection, Lomax Digital Archive, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://lomaxky.omeka.net/items/show/962
Davis, George. When Kentucky Had No Union Men. Folkways Records FA 2343. New York: Folkways Records, 1967. Album reissue page, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://folkways.si.edu/george-davis/when-kentucky-had-no-union-men/american-folk-struggle-protest/music/album/smithsonian
Davis, George. “Harlan County Blues.” Track on When Kentucky Had No Union Men. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://folkways.si.edu/george-davis/when-kentucky-had-no-union-men/american-folk-struggle-protest/music/track/smithsonian
“George S. Davis.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Davis
“George Davis, the ‘Singing Miner.’” WKIC / WSGS, Hazard, Kentucky. Accessed January 8, 2026. http://www.wsgs.com/singing.htm
Cohen, John. “George Davis: When Kentucky Had No Union Men.” Liner notes to When Kentucky Had No Union Men, by George Davis. Folkways Records FA 2343. New York: Folkways Records, 1967. PDF liner notes. https://folkways-media.si.edu/liner_notes/folkways/FW02343.pdf
Cohen, John, ed. Mountain Music of Kentucky. Folkways Records FA 2317. New York: Folkways Records, 1960. Reissued as Smithsonian Folkways SFW CD 40077, 1996. Library catalog record: https://search.moz.ac.at/Record/992603473804520
“Classic Mountain Songs from Smithsonian Folkways.” Smithsonian Folkways Recordings SFW CD 40094, 2002. Album page. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://folkways.si.edu/classic-mountain-songs-from-folkways/american-folk-old-time/music/album/smithsonian
Hatfield, Sharon, ed. Music of Coal: Mining Songs from the Appalachian Coalfields. Wise, VA: Lonesome Pine Records & Publishing / Lonesome Pine Office on Youth, 2007. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Coal
Block, Melissa. “CD Celebrates Music from the Coal Mines.” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, September 3, 2007. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14199893
Green, Archie. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. https://archive.org/details/onlyminerstud00gree
Korson, George. Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943. https://archive.org/details/coaldustonfiddle0000kors
Korson, George, ed. Songs and Ballads of the Bituminous Miners. Washington, DC: Library of Congress Recording Laboratory, 1965. Liner notes and track list. https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/public/gdcmassbookdig/songsballadsofb00kors/songsballadsofb00kors.pdf
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/they-say-in-harlan-county-9780199735683
Valle, Alf. “George Davis: Beyond the Singing Miner.” Southern Folklore 52, no. 1 (1995): 53–67. Bibliographic listing at West Virginia and Regional History Center, Appalachian Studies bibliography. https://researchguides.lib.wvu.edu/appalachianstudies/bibliographies
Special Collections Research Center, Appalachian State University. “Protest Songs of the Appalachian Coalfields.” Research guide, Appalachian Collection. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://library.appstate.edu/research-guides/protest-songs-appalachian-coalfields
Kirby, Rich. “Pick 5: Coal-Mining Songs.” Birthplace of Country Music (Radio Bristol blog), February 2018. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/pick-5-coal-mining-songs/
Library of Congress, American Folklife Center. “Folk Recordings Selected from the Archive of Folk Culture.” Web guide including George Davis’s “Harlan County Blues.” Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/folklife/erg2.html
“Coal Miner’s Boogie / When Kentucky Had No Union Men – The Singing Miner (George Davis).” Bluegrass Discography. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.ibiblio.org/hillwilliam/BGdiscography/?v=fullrecord&albumid=453
“Coal Miner’s Boogie – George Davis.” AllMusic. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.allmusic.com/song/coal-miners-boogie-mt0040034317
Tennessee Ernie Ford Enterprises. “Sixteen Tons: The Story Behind the Legend.” Accessed January 8, 2026. https://tennesseeernieford.com/sixteen-tons
“Sixteen Tons.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons
Davis, Troy. “Family History in Appalachia: George Davis, the ‘Singing Miner’.” UACC Voice (Urban Appalachian Community Coalition blog), November 12, 2015. https://uacvoice.org/2015/11/family-history-in-appalachia-george-davis-the-singing-miner/
Ancestry.com. Kentucky, Death Index, 1911–2000 [database on-line]. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2000. Original data: Commonwealth of Kentucky, Health Data Branch, Division of Epidemiology and Health Planning, Kentucky Death Index, 1911–present. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1222
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. “A Field Guide to… Appalachia.” Playlist notes featuring George Davis, “Harlan County Blues.” Accessed January 8, 2026. https://folkways.si.edu/field-guide-appalachia/playlists/video/smithsonian
Clocktower Radio. “Coal Mining Songs.” Program description highlighting George Davis recordings. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://clocktower.org/show/coal-mining-songs
Author Note: I wrote this piece to follow George S. Davis from LaFollette to Hazard and London, listening for the ways his songs turned mine roof falls, roadblocks, and radio shifts into a kind of living archive. If his records or your own memories of the Singing Miner add details I have missed, I would love to hear them and help fold them into the story.