Premiere: Coyote Motel – “Black Lung Fever”

In a Blues Rock Review exclusive premiere watch the music video for Coyote Motel’s “Black Lung Fever.” The song is featured in the upcoming film, The River. The sound track will be released on March 19.

“Some of the songs in The River: A Songwriter’s Stories of the South are memoirs,” says Ted Drozdowski, Coyote Motel’s leader and the creator of the film. “This is one of them, about my two grandfathers, who I never met because they died from black lung in their forties, well before I was born. But ‘Black Lung Fever’ is a universal immigrant story, to me. They fled poverty and oppression in Poland, only to find more poverty in the New World, despite the back-breaking, claustrophobic work of digging anthracite from the veins of coal they tunneled to. The coal they dug was shipped to the deeper South, along the Cumberland River. My maternal grandmother told me the family was so poor they couldn’t afford the coal my grandfather and the other miners dug, so they carried buckets to the entrance of the mine and filled them up with the chunks of coal that had fallen out of the carts on the way to the breakers. The line about my Mama having no shoes until she went to school is absolutely true.

Drozdowski adds, “Another thing I love about this song is that it alludes to my other family—R.L. Burnside and the other Mississippi hill country artists who befriended me. The arrangement is a north Mississippi hill country grind, straight up, with a couple little twists of my own in the solos and chorus changes. I heard R.L. play tunes like this many times. I loved that old badass!”