Hello June

Fly Away Home Fest, Hazel Dickens’s 100th Birthday Festival, is a Black Lung Benefit Concert taking place June 1, 2025, at Glenwood Park in Princeton WV. This cause is very pressing today, as recent attempted cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), and The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) have imperiled detection and treatment of the disease. Black Lung was a very personal cause to the labor country singer Hazel Dickens, who grew up in Montcalm, WV, in a large coal mining family. She wrote the song titled Black Lung in 1969. “[This] song came from deep personal experience: the trauma of witnessing her brother Thurman die of the affliction, with no funds to pay his medical expenses.” Many of our people have seen up close the way this horrible disease affects loved ones. A raspy, crackling breath, a never-ending cough, and sometimes coughing up black mucus. In severe cases people suffer from low blood oxygen, where they can have a bluish tint to their lips and fingertips that is a sign of succumbing to the disease. The scarring lung tissue from inhaling coal dust over time, slowly taking the place of air, causing decline in lung function, which can lead to respiratory failure, cardiovascular complications leading to heart failure and other heart related problems, increased susceptibility to infection like tuberculosis and lung cancer, which all can lead to a premature death. Many a time, families have looked on in sorrow as they watch the life leave their loved one's body as a direct result of this disease. This is what happened to Hazel’s brother Thurman in 1963. “As [Hazel] painfully [recalled], ‘I think watching him die this horrible death really took a toll on me and the way I thought. He was born, lived, and died poor, and didn’t even have enough to bury himself.’ “Hazel’s performance of this song, received New York Times coverage and won featured exposure on CBS-TV during Walter Cronkite’s Evening News.” The 1970s saw a mass movement to safeguard the safety of coal miners facing this terrible disease, led by many of our fathers and grandfathers in coal mining, who fought for a better life for their coworkers and for the next generations in coal mining. Miners and family members who vigorously fought to take up the cause of their loved ones in coal mining delivered incredible gains in the decades that followed. To honor their memory, and the memories of everyone living and passed who were impacted by this disease, it’s time to take up the cause of our parents and grandparents yet again.