Born in Bristol, Tennessee, to Clarence Thomas Ford and Maud Long, Tennessee ErnieFord began his radio career as an announcer at WOPI-AM in Bristol, Tennessee.
Ford scored an unexpected hit on the pop charts in 1955 with his rendering of "Sixteen Tons", a sparsely arranged coal-miner's lament, that Merle Travis first recorded in 1946 reflecting his own family's experience in the mines of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. The song's authorship has been claimed by both Travis and George S. Davis. Its fatalistic tone contrasted vividly with the sugary pop ballads and rock & roll just starting to dominate the charts at the time:
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store..
1) What do you think Ernie Ford means when he said he "owe my soul to the company store?"
2)Why do you think people would continue to owe their souls to the company store?
3) What, if anything, might save people from owing their soul to the company store?
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