Mary Kay Zuravleff’s novel American Ending is an inventively told story of Russian immigrants settling in Appalachia in the 1910s.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“The narrator’s voice and her story are so unusually vivid it feels like Zuravleff is channeling a real person.”
In her own words, here is Mary Kay Zuravleff’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel American Ending:
As far as sad music goes, Russian folk songs and Appalachian coal mining songs are evenly matched. My novel, American Ending, was inspired by my immigrant ancestors, Appalachian coal miners on both sides of the family, all of them Russian Orthodox Old Believers. I combined stories from my parents and their siblings, as well as my grandparents and their siblings, into a single fictional family. Yelena, the book’s narrator, is the first American born into this family. As such, she expects to live a life different from the one her parents have endured. Before the night’s bedtime story, Ma asks the children, “Russian ending or American ending?” This refrain haunts the book, a gritty and darkly humorous tale of immigration, a worldwide pandemic, and the fragility of citizenship—100 years ago.
American Ending takes place between 1908 and 1920, before the mines were unionized, which made them marginally safer and offered some compensation for black lung and other injuries suffered by so many. I listened to tunes of the era, of my family, and also songs fed to me by those cheering me on to finish this novel.
Geoff Castellucci, “Sixteen Tons”
Geoff Castellucci’s bass voice on this coal-mining classic sounds like he’s singing from the bottom of a mine shaft. Coal miners were worked to death, and what did they get? “Another day older and deeper in debt.” My mother told me about her mother marching into the foreman’s office and demanding that my grandfather be paid in cash rather than scrip, which could only be redeemed at the company store. Miners’ pay was docked for the very picks and explosives they used to get at the coal, as well as their passage to America, their house, and their family’s medical care, which is why they “owed their soul to the company store.”
Sheryl Crow, “Beautiful Dreamer,”
Songs from Mark Twain: Words & Music, 2011
Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” was my maternal grandmother’s favorite song. I remember her high, thin voice singing the opening, “Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me, starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee,” before she ran out of words and would “La-la-la-laaaa-la” the rest.
In my novel, Yelena’s ma sings with her Italian friend, Mrs. G, to practice their “pronounce.” Yelena learns in school that two things can be true at once—their mine can be the safest one built to date and still be dangerous. However, when she hears the song later, she realizes the “beautiful dreamer” may be dead rather than sleeping, two things that can’t both be true.
Limbotheque, “Dark Eyes” (Ochi chornyye)
“Ochi chornyye,” or “Dark Eyes,” is a Russian standard. Yelena’s sister Sonya sings this haunting song at their Thanksgiving gathering. Sonya’s only twelve years old, and one of the miners is already eyeing her as a potential wife, which turns Yelena’ stomach. The first stanza ends with: “How I love you, how I fear you. It seems I met you in an unlucky hour!”
This version is by a Spanish band doing their “Mexcabaret” version of a song that some consider written by a German-Polish composer.
Here’s Frank Sinatra & Jimmy Durante singing it in 1947 in the film It Happened in Brooklyn:
Tyler Childers, “Coal”
When a book is about coal miners, it’s no spoiler to say there will be a mine “accident”—my novel is set in the years and location of the country’s most deadly disasters. Those men (and boys) were far below ground, “where it’s darker than your darkest fears.” Digging into the rock released methane and coal dust into the air; meanwhile, they used explosives and wore a live flame on their miners’ caps! As Childers sings, “That coal is gonna bury you.”
The Paul McKenna Band, “No Ash Will Burn”
My younger child brought this song to me as I was drafting the novel. It’s about a love that cannot be rekindled, and it was written by Walt Aldridge. I’d play this version as I was writing, belting out my harmony with the chorus: “Love is a precious thing I’m told. It burns just like West Virginia coal. But when the fire dies down it’s cold. There ain’t no ash will burn.”
John Prine, “Paradise”
I’ve known this song most of my life. Prine wrote it about his Kentucky hometown of Paradise, plagued by strip mining. In his affable, ironic voice, Prine sings of a child wanting to visit Muhlenberg County, “down by the Green River where Paradise lay,” and his father saying, “I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking. Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.”
At a recent reading, a 9-year-old boy who’d dragged his mother to my event asked, “Why didn’t the mining companies make the mines safer?” Such a compassionate question, where the answer is simply that safety cut into profits.
Prine’s so matter of fact as he has the dad tell his child what the company did, ruining the land and “they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”
Mary Hopkin, “Those Were the Days, My Friend”
In the 1960s, Gene Raskin wrote new lyrics for an old Russian song, “By the long road,” and it was a big hit for the Welsh singer Mary Hopkin in 1968 (produced by Paul McCartney). This version was sung at the Russian weddings of my childhood.
The Chieftains, “Drowsy Maggie”
Miners lived in company houses, each nationality striped up the hill like veins of coal, and each stripe looked down on the one below them. The Scots, Brits, and Welsh were at the bottom, closest to the mine shaft and breathing the worst air, black with coal dust and smelly with sulfur from the coke ovens. Irish, Italians, Slavs, and Poles lived on subsequent levels, with Russians at the top of the hill. They were farthest from everything and as the latest arrivals were despised by the rest, but they had better air, meadows, and a forest for mushroom-hunting.
When Teddy Roosevelt is coming to town, Yelena has high expectations of greeting the American president, but he spouts some palaver and heads out without stepping off the caboose. Amid the grumbling and protests, the Irish musicians come to salute him break into “Drowsy Maggie.”
Johnny Cash, “Loading Coal”
Here’s Johnny Cash singing as a 17-year-old with a clean face whose daddy says it’s time for him to start loading coal. My ancestors started much earlier than seventeen—when the law changed the minimum age to twelve, they got their 8-10-year-old boys back-dated birth certificates so they could work in the mine.
Steve Earle, “Black Lung”
My maternal grandfather started mining as a young boy, and he had black lung from his years underground. Steve Earle’s song starts with a dog who’s running loose, and the miner sings, “Somebody oughta catch him by the collar, but I ain’t going nowhere cause I’m down with black lung. Black lung never gets better, every breath a little bit harder to draw.”
My mother remembers when, after my grandfather left the mines, he lived in an oxygen tent in their living room. Years later, he apologized to her for not being able to run and play with her as a kid, though in the end, he lasted longer than all my other grandparents.
Mary Kay Zuravleff is the award-winning author of American Ending, inspired by all four of her grandparents, Russian Orthodox Old Believers who lived in the Appalachian mining town of Marianna, Pennsylvania, and made their way to Erie. Her third novel, Man Alive!, was a Washington Post Notable Book, and she is the winner of the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award and a multiple recipient of the DC Artist Fellowship. Born in Syracuse, raised in Oklahoma City, and educated in Houston and Baltimore, she lives in Washington, DC.