[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF NASSER: Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. A little while back, Lulu and I had—we were basically starstruck because we got to sit down with a living musical icon.

LULU MILLER: Oh my goodness!

YO-YO MA: Hi, Lulu. Hi, Latif.

LULU: It's so great to meet you!

LATIF: How you doing?

YO-YO MA: Oh my gosh, I can't believe it.

LATIF: Yo-Yo Ma. Yo-Yo, of course, is a famous cellist—kinda the famous cellist. He's won 19 Grammy awards, produced more than 90 musical albums, but the reason we were sitting down to talk to him was ...

YO-YO MA: I'm a newbie at podcasting.

LATIF: [laughs]

LULU: [laughs]

LATIF: Got together with our friend, producer and host Ana González. And they made a whole podcast series called Our Common Nature. And we loved the podcast so much that we wanted to sit down and talk to the two of them about why they made it.

ANA GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, so the idea for the podcast started with Yo-Yo, right? Like, he'd been doing these outdoor performances for about a year, and he was basically trying to reconnect to nature himself.

LATIF: Hmm.

ANA: And bring music outside of the concert hall, playing in locations that you wouldn't necessarily expect to find a classical music concert, like on a riverbed or by a coal mine, in a cave, in the woods. And they were these really intimate performances, kind of to whoever was around. And at a certain point, Yo-Yo wanted to get this to more people. He decided he should have somebody on the ground with him with a microphone, making recordings, making stories. And at some point, he and his team came to me and they asked, "Do you want to be that person? Do you want to be on the ground with a microphone making recordings with me?" And I was like, "Yes, please. That sounds amazing."

YO-YO MA: Well, I was so happy to meet Ana because she also works with children.

LATIF: You may recognize Ana's voice because she's also a producer on our sister show for families, Terrestrials.

YO-YO MA: She has this wonderful podcast with children. And actually, I never grew up.

LULU: [laughs]

YO-YO MA: So I started from a child's point of view. You know, we've all pestered adults with the question, "why" at a certain age.

LULU: Yeah.

YO-YO MA: It's usually around two or three years old. Why? Why, Daddy? Why, Mommy? But I think I never stopped. And then, of course, in the natural world, which I came to later, although I think the fascination was there always, I think, who hasn't looked out in the night sky and wondered what's out there?

ANA: I mean, just all of that that Yo-Yo just said made it so fun to go with him, because he is this great combination of childlike wonder, you know, just having fun playing such a people person. And then would, like, prank me by, like, saying, like, "Oh, I want to say something important," and then, like, make duck sounds into my microphone.

LULU: [laughs]

ANA: And the way that people opened up with Yo-Yo there, him having his cello, playing music as an offering, it opened up these worlds that otherwise would take years, honestly, of relationship building that we could do in a day.

YO-YO MA: What I do as a musician is not unlike what a reporter does. I just have to report it through sound, and you report it through words. Although Ana comes pretty close to reporting it through sound, because in West Virginia, we had a lovely dinner for all the participants that were gonna come in, and they had a cider press. And guess what? Anna was there with her big fuzzy microphone recording the sound of it.

ANA: I think that was the first thing I recorded was Yo-Yo pressing apples on an apple farm. [laughs] Like, I recorded people eating food and fire crackling and the crickets chirping. And so, yeah, I also thought the same thing in that moment, Yo-Yo, I was like, "Oh, we're doing the same thing. You have a cello and I have a microphone, but we're, like, relaying energy and sound and feeling in our own mediums.

YO-YO MA: What Ana did and does is she's able to do—not reporting on facts or even on knowledge, but reporting on experience.

LATIF: The series they ended up making together, I mean, it's basically Ana and Yo-Yo going around to different locations across the country, climbing mountains, rafting rivers, chanting to whales, bringing music to people in these places, and then telling stories of about those places and their connection to the natural world.

YO-YO MA: And that hopefully this—these podcasts are there to give a sense of, through sound and words, what it feels like to be there and to be part of every special community that we've visited. That gives us the best possible way of sharing a deep experience of a place with a radio audience.

LATIF: I think I said this to Ana when I first heard it. Like, it's sort of spiritually refreshing. It's kind of so at odds with all the news or other media that I feel like is out there right now. It feels, like, slower and richer and more human somehow.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

ANA: Thank you, Latif. I mean, yeah, I felt that way the whole time making it. It made it all worth it because everyone deserves that kind of four-dimensional view of their lives and where they live.

LATIF: So we decided to pluck one episode out for you to hear. It takes place in West Virginia, and covers, among other things, a huge recent tragedy I had never even heard of, one of the oldest rivers in the world that is improbably called New River, and a famous song that you may have even sung at karaoke that's based on a lie. Take a listen.

DIANE WILLIAMS: As a little girl, I would go with my granddad to the company store. And all the coal miners would be around and they would say, "Sing me that song." And they would pay me. So I would get a few pennies for penny candy. And it was "Sixteen Tons." So I would sing "Sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go. I owe my soul to the company store."

ANA: That's Diane Williams. She's sitting with me and Yo-Yo and a group of coal miners in New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia. It's the first weekend of fall, and we're outside of a historical mine called Nuttallburg. The Appalachian hills around us are tight and thick with summer leaves. The river behind us is a constant flow. We just had a picnic of pepperoni rolls and Mr. Pibb from real-life coalminer lunch buckets. And then Yo-Yo stood up.

YO-YO MA: As a stranger, I'm so overwhelmed with a sense of appreciation and gratitude for what you have done. It's important to unite all of us, because you've united us once before in what you've done. So what would you like us to take away?

ANA: Coal has formed the lives of so many West Virginians. It's formed this country, really. But there's a dark irony to coal.

DIANE WILLIAMS: [singing] St. Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go.

ANA: You hear it in that song, "Sixteen Tons."

DIANE WILLIAMS: [singing] I owe my soul to the company store.

ANA: And that irony makes it hard to get to know coal if you're an outsider, especially today, as coal faces another challenge: the industry, especially in West Virginia, is shrinking. Coal is changing, but the culture of it is still there in these Appalachian towns. So in this episode, we dig into the music and the stories of West Virginians whose lives are defined by coal to see what keeps people holding onto this place and the black fossil falling out of its hills.

ANA: Hi, I'm Ana González, and this is Our Common Nature, a musical journey with Yo-Yo Ma through this complicated country, to help us all find that connection to nature that so many of us are missing. We climb mountains, play music, drive dirt roads, recite poetry, traverse rivers and oceans and even our own brains, all to figure out how to better live on our planet. Together.

ANA: Can I get you to do the classic intro? Who are you and what do you—what do you do?

YO-YO MA: I'm Yo-Yo Ma and I play the cello. Always great to see you.

ANA: Always great to see you.

YO-YO MA: Thanks for coming all this way.

ANA: Isn't it weird that we have a podcast together?

YO-YO MA: I know, it's fantastic.

ANA: Yo-Yo and I traveled deep into the heart of West Virginia, because it's a place we both don't know very well. And this trip, winding through Appalachian mountain towns, was a way to learn more about this place that holds so much of our country's history and identity.

YO-YO MA: I was struck by the immense beauty of the landscape, and the rivers, and the mountains, and how extraordinarily kind the people we met were.

SINGER-SONGWRITER: [singing] "I lost all my money but a two-dollar bill. I'm on my long journey home."

ANA: Back on that riverbank in New River Gorge by the old mine. We're here with a bunch of people whose lives have been touched by coal: miners, of course, but also a poet and some musicians. We want to get to know this place, so we start on some common ground.

COAL MINER: You know, coal miners is gospel music, country music.

DOM FLEMONS: Oh, lovely.

COAL MINER: Kathy Mattea.

ANA: Kathy Mattea, he said. She's a West Virginian singer-songwriter. And she's here, too.

KATHY MATTEA: Well, they're my people. I mean, they just are.

ANA: Both of Kathy's grandfathers worked in West Virginia mines.

KATHY MATTEA: My grandfather mined a 30-inch seam of coal. He did it with a pick, and would pick sideways into the coal and work his way in. And my grandmother would sew leather patches onto the backs of the top of his shirt, so that when he wedged himself in against the ceiling, it wouldn't wear through his shirts.

ANA: Kathy grew up hearing stories like these from everyone in her family. They'd all gather in one of her grandparents' homes and tell stories and play music. That's where Kathy started playing guitar. Her parents would get her to perform. And this was around the 1970s, when a new song was taking over West Virginia radio.

ANA: How many times would you estimate you've played "Country Roads" in your lifetime?

KATHY MATTEA: [laughs] Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kathy Mattea: [singing] "Almost heaven, West Virginia. Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River." Y'all have to sing with me though because that's the whole point, you know?

ANA: "Take Me Home, Country Roads" is quintessential Americana music. People all over the world know it. And in West Virginia, this song is the song. West Virginia University football games, high school graduations, weddings. It is so nostalgic for this version of West Virginia that feels good. And it's absolutely beautiful—but it's not really true.

KATHY MATTEA: Because all the specific locations they mention are in Virginia.

ANA: Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River. Those are Virginia landmarks. And while the mountains and the river both technically travel into West Virginia, it's the most Eastern side. And the song is just clearly not written for West Virginia. Kathy said the songwriters had never even been to West Virginia when they wrote the lyrics. They were singer songwriters in Washington, DC, who started naming pretty landmarks in that general area. One of them was thinking about his home in Massachusetts, but they decided to use "West Virginia" because it sounded really nice.

KATHY MATTEA: The people who wrote it didn't know. But, you know, where else are you gonna find a song that's coming out of all the dashboards of all the radios and all the cars in the country that screams, "West Virginia, mountain mama, take me home."

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kathy Mattea: [singing] "Take me home, country roads."]

[applause]

KATHY MATTEA: It's like a place where people feel invisible, and so to have that celebratory song that's proclaiming our existence and that yearning to be there is profound for people who are from there.  And we might be on completely different sides of the political spectrum and the social spectrum and all those things, but we can sing country roads together.

ANA: So this song that the whole world thinks of as representing West Virginia actually doesn't—at least not, like, literally. And as we sit along the riverbank, a coal miner named Dorsel brings up another musician that he thinks represents West Virginia.

DORSEL: Bill Withers, he's from here.

ANA: Bill Withers, like "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone," "Just the Two of Us." Bill Withers, he grew up in a coal mining town in West Virginia.

DORSEL: Yeah, "Lean on Me."

KATHY MATTEA: You told me, Dorsel, that he wrote "Lean On Me" about living in the coal camp.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Bill Withers: [singing] "Just call on me, brother, when you need a hand."]

ANA: Kathy met Bill one time, and he told her his song about people leaning on each other, supporting each other, was written about coal miners.

KATHY MATTEA: And nobody cared what color anybody was.

DORSEL: That's right.

KATHY MATTEA: Yeah. He said nobody cared. It just wasn't a thing. In the community, everybody just helped each other.

DORSEL: That's right. So always look out for each other.

DOM FLEMONS: As long as you're on that same crew, everybody's the same crew.

COAL MINER: There's a lot of Black men, and they work just as hard as the white man. And as long as everybody did their job, everybody got along really good.

ANA: So they're saying that "Lean On Me" is about the ways miners supported each other no matter their race. And I'd love to believe life actually played out like that, but in the crowd are two Black women. Diane, who spoke at the top of the show and sang "Sixteen Tons" and her mom, Zora.

ZORA: I'm Zora. I worked underground for 20 years.

ANA: It's hard to hear Zora because she spent decades in the mines, and now her lungs are damaged. So her daughter, Diane, who's sitting right next to her and holding her hand, she speaks up.

DIANE WILLIAMS:  This is my mother, Zora. She worked in the coal mines down at Maple Meadows for 20-plus years until it closed. Us, as we were growing up, about the young men that she worked with. But she always had a story to tell about how the men would pick at her and would make her do their work. If she—if she cleaned her belt, they would always leave some more for her to do, and how she used to threaten to beat their you know whats when she got them outside.

ANA: Okay, that's a little different from Kathy Mattea's read on "Lean on Me." And it turns out that Zora and Diane come from a big mining family.

DIANE WILLIAMS: You talk about history. So my granddad was a coal miner, my uncle was a coal miner, my mom. I still have a brother, Christopher Saunders, that's still working in the coal mines.

ANA: So if I want to get to know this place some more, I have to meet Chris.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: I mean, in coal mining, we always say, "Everybody's gonna be Black at the end of the day."

ANA: Chris Saunders, after the break.

ANA: Our Common Nature is back. We're in West Virginia meeting up with present-day coal miner, Chris Saunders—who also happens to be Black.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: And when you underground, you put all that aside. If you have any prejudice in you, all that, because you gotta work together, you gotta work safe. And now when they come back up, it might be a different story.

ANA: We met up at a local history museum in West Virginia. It focuses on coal mining, and there was an exhibit dedicated to his mom, Zora.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah.

ANA: [gasps] There she is!

CHRIS SAUNDERS: And this is one of the pictures. This was the crew that she worked with at the end. And that's her.

 ANA: There's this great photo of Zora in a hard hat and aviator sunglasses, leaning up against a chain link fence. And she has the face of a woman who's put up with a lot of shit.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: And it's so true, because there's still a stigma about women being in the coal mines. So—plus she was a Black woman, so that stigma was there.

ANA:  Chris told me his mom came to coal mining as a single mom of four. She moved down from New York City to take care of her aging parents. And her dad actually was a coal miner. For Zora, working in the mines was a livable wage—it would pay for the house, the kids, the parents. But the other miners let her know that a woman, and a Black woman at that, wasn't part of the boys' club.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: My mom's a hard worker. She said, "I'm gonna prove to you I can outwork you, I can out-think you. I'm gonna treat you with love and kindness regardless of what you say or do to me." She said "Sometimes you just gotta let it roll off your back and keep on doing what you gotta do." She had a guy that was always wanting to tell her the N-word jokes. She said, "Oh baby, I ain't got time for that." She said, "I'll tell you what you do. Write them out for me and let me read them." So every day, he's writing these big long jokes, and she'd just fold them up, fold them up. And then he'd come to her one day and he'd say, "I'm the one dumb enough to be writing these jokes out, and you ain't doing nothing but throwing them away." She said, "No, I got them all. I'm making you a book." [laughs] Like yeah. And buddy, he just laughed. He said, "Mama, I'm sorry." You know? And that's just the way she was. She said, "Now he gonna sit up and waste his time writing these jokes out every day, and I let him do it." That's my mom, y'all. I mean, that's just her.

ANA: And this was just one of the stories Chris had about his mom warding off bullies. They'd steal her lunch.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: She baked brownies and put Ex-Lax in them. And so she knew exactly who was getting in her lunch buck—or her bucket, that's what they call it.

 ANA: Some days, she didn't have a good comeback or the energy to bake brownies. Some days she was tired.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: She would always say, "I done the best I could for y'all." Said, "I know that mom," you know? And she would apologize for not being there a lot. So—but I had a great mom. Still do. I'm a big softie. [laughs] And she taught us how to love people.

ANA: The sentiment behind "Lean on Me" was probably not true for Zora, but it is for Chris. He's committed to the job and his coworkers through thick and thin.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: You know, the money was good. To be an Appalachian, to go to high school and get out and can make a hundred grand right out the gate. Eighteen years old. Huh? I'm just telling you, that's the type of money they paying you. And give you health insurance for everybody in the family. And I look at it like this, I chose to do this, but if I gotta be on oxygen again, I don't want it.

ANA: Yeah. Do you think about that with your mom?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah.

ANA: Zora's condition has worsened since I saw her along the banks of the river, and now she can't speak without oxygen. Chris is worried about her. But that's not the only thing he's worried about.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: We have what I call—I'm gonna keep it right, kiss-my-butt curves. Like, you're gonna go around and then you go—so we get ready to go through a few of them down this way.

ANA: If you look at a map of Route 3 heading west from Beckley, West Virginia, it looks like a squiggle. It follows every twist and turn of the Coal River. Through Eccles, Glen Daniel, Rock Creek and Dry Creek, my producer Alan is swerving in a rental car with Chris Saunders as a passenger. And I'm in the back seat trying not to get carsick.

ANA: I see a lot of Trump.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. All of us love Trump. Yeah, everybody here.

ANA: Is that because of the coal?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: That, and now he's an outlaw, so ...

ANA: Oh, they're like, "It's that guy." Like, how much of the population's related to coal?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Probably 90 percent.

ANA: Got it.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah.

ANA: Mm-hmm.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: It's either railroad, coal or timber.

ANA: Yeah. And the railroad is how you move the coal and the timber.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Right. Right. Right.

ANA: Is this weird for you to be in a car with people asking you all these questions?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah. Yeah, but it's all right. I like to talk.

ANA: Chris, like a lot of miners, isn't quick to trust people with microphones. We couldn't get permission to even enter the parking lots of any of the coal mines that we're driving by. People are even suspicious of the North Carolina plates on the rental car.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: He know he can't drive down here. What he doing up here? Yeah. But this one here, look. This is the kiss-your-butt one, I call it.

ANA: West Virginia is an isolated place. It's not only the geography, but the culture. People not from here don't always get it. And the truth is that coal formed these towns. Coal built these houses, and set these families up for generations. Coal formed unions and made billion-dollar deals. But coal kills, and coal releases massive amounts of pollution into the world. People today don't usually understand why anyone in the 21st century would work in this industry.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah. And that's why I was kind of leery about talking to you at first.

ANA: Yeah.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: I'm just being truthful, you know? Because I said, now I don't want to say—you know, be nothing negative to what I do. And there's negative to every job, it really is. But it has been great to my family, financially and stuff like that.

ANA: Yeah.

ANA: But for Chris, mining is about more than just making money. It's about survival.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: In the '80s and stuff, I got into the drug trade and got on some stuff I had no business doing, you know? And then I started going to church, and '93 is the year I went into mining. That was just a prayer. I was like, "Well, God, here I am now. I need to provide for my family. The street life ain't gonna get it." You know? And God opened doors. I wanted to follow in my mom's footsteps. And it's been a great way to provide for my family.

ANA: I think that's what we're trying to get at.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Right.

ALAN GOFFINSKI: And it's complicated.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah, it is.

ANA: The history and culture of coal is complicated. Human beings have actually used coal for fuel for thousands of years. People would just pick it out of the hills and burn it, because coal itself is just actually fossilized plant material that's millions of years old. But it's only in the past century or so that coal mining in the United States has grown to be King Coal. So much of our world is made with coal—and specifically West Virginia coal. Because this is a special type of coal. They call it high metallurgical coal, meaning it's higher in carbon and lower in moisture than thermal coal, which we use for fuel and heat. High-met coal is some of the best in the world to turn into iron and steel.

YO-YO MA: That's the pride that I think that people in West Virginia must feel for having actually been the power source behind the development of iron and steel in this country, which meant westward movement, building railroads, cities. That connection was completely lost on me until I went there.

ANA: Yeah. And it's still going today, so there is still that pride that people who mine coal for generations, they still love it.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: The company I work for, I know they export to China, South Korea. You have a lot of big steel mills in India. And then you have Ukraine right now is shut down, but Ukraine was a big steel producer for Europe.

ANA: Yeah. And they're buying US coal.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yes. Yeah. Because again, you have the best coal in the world to make steel.

ANA: The culture of coal mining is baked into West Virginia, but it is from another time when more people could get coal jobs. The mines themselves have become more automated and mechanized. The work is different, and they need fewer workers. Even though coal is still being used to make everything from electric cars to solar panels and housing, as we drive deeper down Route 3, the towns get smaller. We see abandoned company stores and downtown ghost lands.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: This was the old grade school, all right? During the explosion, they were lined up from there on both sides of the road.

ANA: He's talking about TV reporters from CNN and other outlets.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yep, all the way down. That's where I had to drive through them every day. They would start right there.

ANA: What those news outlets were covering, after the break.

ANA: This is Our Common Nature. I'm Ana. Before the break, coal miner Chris Saunders was taking us on a road trip all along Route 3 in West Virginia, and now we've reached our destination.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Now look on top of the hill right here. You see where the tube went in? That's the coal seam right there.

ANA: We pull off the road and park on the gravel beneath a long metal tube connecting one mountain to another. It's the conveyor belt that transported coal between mining operations.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: I don't know if you can see the black on top of the hill. Then you usually have other seams below it. But that's the eagle seam that we mined.

ANA: Seams are layers in the earth where the coal is. It's where the mines are set up to extract the coal. And until I saw this, I didn't really understand how modern coal mining worked. I thought it was still like Kathy's grandfathers described: 30 inches tall and picked out with hand tools. But this mine, the Upper Big Branch Mine, is a colossal compound in the hills. Upper Big Branch used to be one of West Virginia's largest coal producers. It was owned by Massey Energy, a huge name in coal for decades. And even as there were more safety regulations placed on mining, Massey was consistently cited and fined for not following them. The heavy machinery used today to dig into coal seams brings up more and more coal dust which, suspended in air, is explosive. In a perfect world, coal dust is blown out of the mines with giant ventilation systems. But nothing is perfect. On April 5, 2010, a little after 3:00 pm, one of the teams at Upper Big Branch burrowed into a pocket of methane gas that exploded and ignited the unventilated coal dust.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: I was underground. I was a section boss that evening. And it was just a crazy evening outside. You could see this storm coming in, and we was doing our safety meeting about the time the explosion hit. I heard Everett telling Leon "It's bad." I said, "Leon, what's going on?" He said, "Been explosion." He said, "32 people could be dead or trapped." He said, "Don't say nothing yet. I don't want to cause panic."

ANA: But the news got out.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: And see, they actually suffocated. Everything pulls out of the air, and they was all, like, packed in there. You know, like instantly you done dropped down to 15, 16 percent oxygen.

ALAN GOFFINSKI: These are friends of yours?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah. I lost a lot of friends. Yeah. Knew every one of them.

ALAN GOFFINSKI: I'm sorry about that.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah. Yeah, 29 people that day.

ANA: Chris has led us to a makeshift monument: 29 hardhats sit on 29 crosses. Family and friends have placed Christmas trees and lunch pails, necklaces, bottles of liquor, next to the names of their loved ones killed in the explosion.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: I actually worked with Joel, Robert Clark, Steve Harrah—we called him Head. Maynor, Willingham, Persinger, and Spanky. Me and Spanky was close. Only two people lived. Mousy, but he's—his mind went, I guess the lack of oxygen. Then another boy named Bennett, he—he doing fine. He was younger.

ANA: Like, losing this many people, was that fear ever there when you went into it?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah. Oh, yeah. After this, yeah.

ANA: Yeah. But before this, did you ever think this was possible?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: No. No, you don't—I don't know. You—like I say, you get complacent. You never think about no disasters like this.

ANA: The Upper Big Branch explosion was the worst mine disaster in the United States in 40 years. In its aftermath, the families of the miners who died were thrust into the headlines of national news cycles. Meanwhile, they had 29 funerals to plan and attend, and 29 families had to face a new reality and begin rebuilding their lives. The surviving miners like Chris had to show up for work the very next day.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Why didn't we just take at least a day for respect? At that time, you know, far as I guess in the corporate mind, well, we don't want to admit that we've done nothing wrong. Buddy, you already in this now. You might as well just shut down, regroup. You know, 29 people dead, regardless who wrong, let's show some type of respect. And that always bothered me. It still bothers me, because if I was a CEO of a company, that's what we would have done. Regardless of who wrong, who right, what happened. You know, we—we gonna hash that out later. These people that lost friends, family, regardless, let's show some kind of compassion.

ANA: Chris never speaks too harshly about his employer. He's careful to tow the line. His life, his livelihood, his identity as a coal miner would all be at risk. But Crystal Good can speak up.

CRYSTAL GOOD: The poem came, but it came, "What you know about black diamonds, black diamonds, black diamonds? Hey, hey, hey, hey." For, like, two years. So I just walk around the house singing just that, right?

ANA: Crystal is a writer, an activist and a West Virginian who watched the news of Upper Big Branch as it played out on TV.

CRYSTAL GOOD: [reading] "Black diamonds form on days like April 5, 2010, the day that started just like all the other days. The other days just like all the days, the hundreds of days that the earth fell in on miners, trapping them underground with nothing but their prayers. This time on April 5, 2010, 29 men died in what they call a 'mine disaster.'" So much of the Upper Big Branch was like national news organizations seeing Black people on the news and being like, "Wait a minute, Black coal miners?" Like, this country doesn't even know about the history, you know? The labor of Black men in West Virginia and the families, you know?

ANA: The injustice of it all stuck with her—West Virginia, a place where people feel invisible, on a national platform for a disaster. She watched some Massey executives pay fines and go to jail. And she talked to the widows of miners who never got a chance to tell their side of the story.

CRYSTAL GOOD: [reading] "When every coal miner's wife sheds a tear, there comes the pressure. Compacted, compacted, compacted.

ANA: This is her performing the poem next to the New River.

CRYSTAL GOOD: [reading] "Industrial homicide, homicide, homicide. Dead. 29 miners. Black diamonds, black diamonds? In pages where black ink fades until somebody digs and some brave heart will always hear the call and dig deep inside the earth so that millions and millions of years from now, they will hold up and marvel at our diamonds and wonder at their priceless, priceless love, formed by the pressure, the pressure, the pressure, and the salt of her tears.

ANA: Crystal has performed this poem on the steps of the West Virginia Capitol. She's performed it on stage and among people, and whenever she performs it ...

CRYSTAL GOOD: People cry.

ANA: The biggest thing I've learned about West Virginia is just how much coal seeped out of these hills and into people's lives. Everyone has a story about how coal has either enriched their lives or taken from them. And a lot of the time, it's a mixture of both. Crystal knows that as a writer and a poet, she has the almost responsibility to articulate those complex emotions that people aren't always able to express themselves. And part of that responsibility comes from yes, identifying as an artist, but the other part comes from identifying as Black in Appalachia.

CRYSTAL GOOD: West Virginia is three percent Black. It's survival. Tell me how you're gonna survive in a coal mine talking about, you know, Black power and, you know, fuck the police. And, you know, so I think people had to survive here, right?

ANA: Like Zora and like Chris, there are days where it's harder for Crystal to find the energy to survive here. Like the day that she woke up to find that a coal company had poisoned her water supply.

CRYSTAL GOOD: And it stunk. The whole air, everything smelled like licorice. Ugh! I can't even eat licorice to this day. It makes me sick just even thinking about it.

ANA: After weeks of buying water to drink and shower and cook, Crystal found it in her to sue the company. And she won.

CRYSTAL GOOD: And then folks got their checks, which weren't much. I think people might've got $500. It just kind of made me think: what really is a win?

ANA:  Like it wasn't worth it?

CRYSTAL GOOD: I lost all of my friends. They all left.

ANA: A lot of Crystal's friends who could leave West Virginia did, because of the fear that this could happen again. Crystal stayed, but now it's been more than 10 years and she's tired of fighting.

CRYSTAL GOOD: I only have so much energy, and I only have so much time on this planet. And living in West Virginia, the statistics, you die earlier. Like, the statistics suck.

ANA: West Virginia's life expectancy is the second lowest in the nation. Its population is declining faster than any other US state. That's because of new epidemics like drugs, but also old ones like poverty, and the pollution from coal. If Chris Saunders and Crystal Good met, they probably would disagree on some core things, but they're also both part of that three percent of Black West Virginians who have chosen to stay in this place despite the statistics, the disasters and the daily grind of finding a way through. Because outside of all of that, West Virginia is more than coal. And that's where Crystal finds her strength.

CRYSTAL GOOD: You know, the coal barons are gonna coal baron. But maybe the coal barons couldn't coal baron so hard if we actually kind of built our everyday lives and our school systems and our nursing homes and everything, you know, with nature in mind. And I have no idea how to do this, what I'm talking about, but what I can do is take another group of kids down the New River next year and the next year and the next year.

YO-YO MA: Absolutely. I mean, the natural world is all energy. It's the transfer of energy, and life takes place. That's the miracle.

ANA: I asked Yo-Yo about how he finds the energy to keep going in his life. When the days feel long, where does he go in the world or in his mind to get through and still perform and be Yo-Yo Ma for the world. And it turns out, he also goes to a place in the mountains.

YO-YO MA: There's a stream. A sound of a rustling brook is maybe one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. And you could see the stars. I saw birds, some blue jays. There was a cardinal. I was listening to the chirping, the tweeting. And it was the most beautiful music in the world. So I carry this memory. It stays there. That will help me get through what I need to get through. I think about really, the whole cycle of living, it's inseparable that we are part of this world, we are part of nature. We are part of the stars, we are part of the Earth. And I used to not think that. But I now do think that more and more.

TEACHER: Let's go forward five strokes again.

CHILD: Greetings. Greetings, recording friends.

CHILD: I'm wearing the newest fur fashion. I got the new blanket.

ANA: What did we just do?

CHILD: Water rafting and I'm cold.

ANA: It's early fall on the New River. There are three big blue whitewater rafts filled with kids from a middle school program called Step By Step.

ANA: So who am I talking to?

JOSIAH: You're, you're talking to Josiah.

ANA: And who else?

BRANLEY: My name's Branley.

ISRAEL: Israel.

ANGEL: Angel.

ANA: Have you ever been whitewater rafting before?

BRANLEY: No, this is my first time.

ANA: I'm in one raft. Crystal Good, the poet, is on another. And we're all paddling down the New River to meet up with Yo-Yo.

ISRAEL: Yo-Yo!

BRANLEY: You on a first name basis?

ANA: Yo-Yo's waiting on the banks of the river with his cello, and he begins to play Bach's Cello Suite 1 Prelude in G major, obviously.

YO-YO MA: I told you there was a cellist everywhere!

[laughter]

ANA: After he finished playing, Yo-Yo hopped on one of the rafts and challenged everybody to a race.

YO-YO MA: Well, of course. [laughs]

ANA: You were, like, yelling. You were like Coach Yo-Yo, like, "Come on, everybody!"

YO-YO MA: I think we lost, but that's okay. We had such a good time. We had such a good time. There's nothing like being in nature and doing something participatory. And that breaks the ice, and the kids were so different from before and after.

ANA: Oh yeah, big time.

ANA: At the end, a couple of them performed a song that they wrote from scratch.

JOSIAH: Mm-hmm. A beat next time. Mm-hmm. They got all that.

ANGEL: [singing] I been makin' that money, I been makin' it since I was 10. Ay!" [laughs] That's the main part of the chorus.

YO-YO MA: It's great. It's fantastic. And that's how it comes out, right? You know, you're relaxed enough, you're safe enough, and it's—it's fantastic. It's goofy. It's fun. And guess what? It was memorable. You still remember it.

ANGEL: Oh yeah.

ANA: The sun set, and we made it off the river to get a good West Virginia dinner of barbecue and mac and cheese under the string lights of a riverside pavilion. There's a mix of river guides and kids of all ages fixing plates and chit chatting. It's our last night in West Virginia, so a lot of familiar faces have come out to join in on the food and get a little song going.

DOM FLEMONS: You ready, Maestro?

YO-YO MA: I'm no maestro. [laughs] I'm not sure I'm ready.

DOM FLEMONS: All right. Well let's see if we can get it. One, two, one, two, three.

[music]

ANA: Banjo player Dom Flemons is here playing this tune that he wrote with Yo-Yo. And pretty soon, he switches to an old line dancing song.

DOM FLEMONS:  This is a piece called "Great Big Eight" here.

ANA: And starts calling dances.

DOM FLEMONS: You know, when I used to play this one with Joe, he would kick his head back and he'd do a couple of square dance calls. And he'd go like this, "Great big eight, great big eight."

YO-YO MA: Boy, we need one another in order to function and survive and thrive. We need one another, and we need to do things together in order to break the ice and to break the cycle of fear, of mistrust and territoriality. We build up these walls when we're kind of scared. And when we're on the water together, we're doing something. Afterwards, it's—it's different.

[applause]

DOM FLEMONS: Thank you all, so much.

ANA: There was time for one more song. Any guesses?

KATHY MATTEA: So this would be like the national anthem for West Virginia. Except that all the geographical references are wrong.

[laughter]

KATHY MATTEA: People were requesting it this afternoon, and it's just always like a great—it's a great opportunity for everyone to sing along.

[singing]

ANA: If I wanted to get to know West Virginia, I think this is a good start. It's singing the words to "Take Me Home, Country Roads" even though I know they're not technically right, because it feels good to sing by a river with people who love this state and will continue to love it even through disaster and heartbreak. And who all share a future in this place if they keep fighting for it. A notable absence, though, was Chris and his mom, Zora.

[phone rings]

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Hello?

ANA: Hey, Chris. It's Ana from the podcast.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Hey, Ana.

ANA: Yeah. Yes. I was just calling because I was just so sad to hear about your mom and I just wanted to ...

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah.

ANA: ... see how you're doing.

ANA: A few weeks after recording with Chris, he texted me and said his mom, Zora, had died.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: You know Mama, she done everything her way. And so she told us all she was ready to go. She said, "Jesus got my house ready." That's what she told us. We read her lips. And my sister sung to her, she patted her foot and just smiled, and she looked at me and said "Ain't you gotta go to work?" [laughs]

ANA: No!

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so I mean ...

ANA: What did your sister sing to her?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: She liked this one song "Jesus on the main line, tell him what you want/ If you need a healing tell him what you want/if you need a miracle/tell him what you want." It was one of her favorite songs.

ANA: Hmm.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah, "Jesus on the mainline. Call him up. Call him up. Tell him what you want." Yeah, that was one of her songs.

ANA: Are you having services for her?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yes. Yes, and I'm gonna work up until Monday anyway, I know you probably think I'm crazy. [laughs]

ANA: You can't get time off?

CHRIS SAUNDERS: Yeah, but I'm—I'm—they only gonna give me three days, so I'm gonna work tonight, tomorrow. And then Monday morning, I won't go back. My boss is like, "I never seen nobody like you." He said, "You're all right." You know, 'cause they worry about me getting hurt or something, too.

ANA: Yeah.

CHRIS SAUNDERS: And I said, "No, I'm fine." I said, "I talked to my mama. My mom loved me and I loved her." I said, "And we just coal miners, you know?

ANA: Chris told me that when the funeral parlor found out his mom was a coal miner, they gave him a discount. And they're talking about building a monument to her in the cemetery.

DOM FLEMONS: And now for this one here, there's gonna be one line that comes up a whole bunch, "We are almost down to the shore." And I'm just gonna run it one time so you can hear it. [singing] "We are almost down to the shore." Let's try it one time. "We are almost down to the shore. Moses out on the mountaintop, Praise the Lord, said Moses' heart, wе are almost down to the shore."

ANA: I want to end with this song that Dom Flemons sang on the banks of the New River by that old coal mine where we ate pepperoni rolls. He sang it to me and Yo-Yo and Kathy Mattea, to Crystal, and to Zora. He found this song in the Library of Congress, recorded by John Lomax. It was written and performed by a Black musician named Jimmie Strothers.

DOM FLEMONS:  He worked in a coal mine outside of Baltimore. And he was caught in an accident and he was blinded by it. And he met John Lomax about a year after he had gone blind. And that was the one recording they had made of that song, "We Are Almost Down to the Shore."

ANA: Wow!

DOM FLEMONS: [singing] "Peter, Peter, out on the sea, drop your nets and follow me. We are almost down to the shore."

ANA: Despite it all, coal led us here to this sweet moment along the New River. And maybe the lyrics of this song aren't quite true either—not literally. But the feeling I get every time I hear it transcends that. I go back to the hills and the river. I see Zora holding her daughter's hand. I see Chris and Crystal and the kids on that raft racing Yo-Yo down the river. I see a place where the river flows clean under cloudless skies, and the country roads take everybody home.

DOM FLEMONS: [singing] "Fight on, fight on, children don't turn back. We are almost down to the shore."

ANA: That's Dom Flemons singing us out.

ANA: Our Common Nature is a production of WNYC and Sound Postings. Hosted by me, Ana González, produced by Alan Goffinski, with editing from Pearl Marvell. Sound design and episode music by Alan Goffinski. Mixed by Joe Plourde, fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Our executive Producers are Emily Botein, Ben Mandelkern, Sophie Shackleton and Jonathan Bays. Our advisors are Mira Burt-Wintonick, Kamaka Dias, Kelley Libbey and Chris Newell

ANA: Music in this episode by Kathy Mattea and Dom Flemons. If you want to hear a beautiful studio recording of "We Are Almost Down to the Shore," check out Dom's album Traveling Wildfire.

ANA: Special thanks to Matt Eich for letting me use his phone to record on a river raft. To Leslie Baker at the Beckley Coal Mine and Exhibition Museum ,and to New River Gorge National Park. And if you want to listen to more music from this series, you can check out the Our Common Nature EP, featuring Yo-Yo playing with Eric Mingus, Jen Kreisberg and an Icelandic choir. Now available on all streaming platforms.

ANA: This podcast was inspired by a project of the same name, conceived by Yo-Yo Ma and Sound Postings, with creative direction by Sophie Shackleton, in collaboration with partners all over the world. Our Common Nature is made possible with support from Emerson Collective and Tambourine Philanthropies.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Cordelia, and I'm from New York City. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Adina. I'm calling from Greensberg. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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