The Anthem of the Working Stiff

by Casey N. Cep

I don’t know what men are made of, though a song I love begins: “Some people say a man is made out of mud.” Perhaps the dust of Eden got wet with the kiss of the Lord and made mud, and from that Adam was made, but that’s not what Tennessee Ernie Ford meant when he sang “a poor man’s made out of muscle and blood.”

“Sixteen Tons” is the anthem of the working stiff. Ford didn’t write the song and he wasn’t the first to record it, but his version from 1955 has worked its way into the assembly-line-addled ears and labor-worn hearts of workers ever since. Whatever a man is actually made of, saying he’s made of “muscle and blood and skin and bones, a mind that’s weak a back that’s strong” is acknowledging that’s what the world has made him into, and that righteous lament is why the song’s still so popular.

I thought of “Sixteen Tons” the other day while listening to Lorde’s “Royals.” The off-beat snapping in both songs made me realize that if we’re not too busy tweeting the revolution, then we’ll probably be snapping our fingers. The snaps even start to sound kind of menacing, like the tell-tale heart of the working class about to explode, especially when Ford sings, “fightin’ and trouble are my middle name.”

But how did he get there? “Sixteen Tons” laments cradle-to-grave work in the mines. “I was born one morning when the sun didn’t shine,” Ford sings: “I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine.” It’s a country song that we wish to be decades out of date, but it’s not, instead it’s all too contemporary; there are still millions of people who wake up every day thinking something like “Saint Peter don’t you call me cause I can’t go: I owe my soul to the company store.”

“Sixteen Tons” endures because we are almost all always getting “another day older and deeper in debt.” It is easy to feel, and it is often true, that despite our hard work, the bills unpaid while the debts grow. Ford might have owed his “soul to the company store,” but we owe ours to credit cards or student loans, car companies or mortgage brokers.

You take sixteen calls or file sixteen memos, write sixteen posts or sell sixteen ads, work sixteen hours: you do whatever interval of whatever work you do every day of your working life, and that is what “Sixteen Tons” is about. The song isn’t just a lament for mining, but any kind of exploitative work, which is almost every kind of work.

Country Time is an occasional column about country music.

Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.