1921 was the year   Seems like yesterday to me   Let me tell you 'bout what happened then   Back in the mine country   We were fightin' hard to build a union   'Cause at forty cents a ton   There was no way to feed a family   When the minin' day was done      The strike had lasted for a year   When they shot down Smilin' Sid   He was a lawman who stood up for us miners   That's the only crime he ever did   A hundred miners locked up with no trial   There in Mingo-town   But the last straw came in Sharples   When the gunned the women down      Now we're marchin' on to Mingo   Ten thousand men and countin'   Here in the hills of West Virginia   At the Battle of Blair Mountain      We shouted through the hillsides   In every union hall   We're marchin' on to Mingo   Teach them a lesson, once and all   We commandeered every freight train   To the Kentucky line   Took every car that crossed our path   And all the guns and ammo we could find      The union leaders tried to stop us   Mother Jones told us to turn back   But we had learned ourselves from the gun thugs   There's a time to talk and a time to attack   We had no leader, we didn't need one   We all knew the way through Logan County   And we all knew once we got there   We're gonna hang Sheriff Chapin from a sour apple tree      We're marchin' on to Mingo   Ten thousand men and countin'   Here in the hills of West Virginia   At the Battle of Blair Mountain      For three days and nights we fought them   The front was ten miles wide   Every cop and scab in West Virginia   Was there on the other side   They dropped explosives from their airplanes   Such a thing you never saw   They shot us with machine guns   It was the operator's law      We dug trenches and wore helmets   That we brought from the Argonne   All the way from France to Logan   We fought from dusk to dawn   President Harding sent in the Army   And we left our line to them   But the hills of West Virginia   Will long remember when      We were marchin' on to Mingo   Ten thousand men and countin'   Here in the hills of West Virginia   At the Battle of Blair Mountain