90. Talking Centralia. Woody Guthrie

This song, which is actually spoken (hence the name), is about the Centralia mining disaster of 1947, in which 111 miners were killed. Centralia is where my dad grew up; it's in southern Illinois about an hour east of St. Louis, Missouri, and it's named for the Illinois Central Railroad. My dad would have been 12 when the mine exploded. My aunt says that the mine whistle blew long and loud to announce the emergency. My granddad was just arriving home from work at the Illinois Central Railroad, where he was an electrician, when he got a call to hurry down to the mine to help. A neighbour of theirs two doors down died in the mine. Apparently, on the day of the explosion (March 25) Woody Guthrie sat down and wrote three songs about the disaster.