Dark as a Dungeon was written by Merle Travis, © copyright 1947, American Music Inc., Hollywood. Permission requested.
This Merle Travis song is included her because it is #155 in song-catcher Alan Lomax’s book The Folk Songs of North America (in the English Language). Lomax writes, this song, along with Sixteen Tons, “conform so superbly to our native ballad tradition that they have already gone into oral circulation throughout the English speaking world.”
I first heard this song sung by Merle Travis with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their classic Will the Circle Be Unbroken album. Recently at one of our Tuesday Night Song Swappers session we sang it with three melody variations at the same time. It was not pleasant. But melody variations are par for the course with oral circulated songs.
Dark as a Dungeon
[for chords and lyrics download PDF]
Come listen you fellers so young and fine
Oh seek not your fortune
in the dark dreary mine
It will form as a habit and seep in your soul
Till the stream of your blood
is as black as the coal.
It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where danger is double
and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a dungeon
way down in the mines.
It’s many a man I’ve known in my day
Who lived just to labor
his young life away
Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine
A man will have lust
for the lure of the mine.
It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where danger is double
and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a dungeon
way down in the mines.
The midnight, the morning,
or the middle of the day
It’s the same to the miner who labors away
Where the demons of the death
often come by surprise
One fall of the slate
and you’re buried alive.
It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where danger is double
and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a dungeon
way down in the mines.
I hope when I’m gone and the ages shall roll
My body will blacken
and turn into coal
Then I’ll look from the door of my heavenly home
and pity the miner a-diggin’ my bones.
It’s dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where danger is double
and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It’s dark as a dungeon
way down in the mines.
* * *
The tune and lyrics are in the public domain unless otherwise noted.
The recording © copyright 2010 by Stephen Griffith and may be used by permission of the copyright holder. A note about the recording: This recording of “Dark as a Dungeon” is a rehearsal demo, with click track, recorded for YouTube on a Zoom Q3 using my 1968 Gibson Dove. The audio tracks (not used on YouTube) were recorded using two Rode Condenser Studio Microphones on a Zoom Handheld 4-trek 24-bit Recorder.
