Labour & Pop Culture: Blackhawk

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is EmmyLou Harris’ “Blackhawk”. This is a song a Facebook friend suggested and one I hadn’t heard before.

On the surface, it is a melancholy look back at the lives of two working class Canadians in Hamilton (which is where the Dofasco steel mill is located). The most evocative bit of lyric is this:

Hold on to your aching heart
I'll wipe the liquor from your lips
A small town hero never dies
He fades a bit and then he slips
Down into the blast furnace
In the heat of the open hearth
And at the punch clock, he remembers
Blackhawk and the white winged dove

So what has happened here? Obviously something happened to Blackhawk. But whether it was a literal slip into a blast furnace or some sort of nod to spiritual death due to the unrelenting nature of the work, is a bit unclear.

I’m more inclined to the “grind” explanation as the song continues to talk about raising kids and being in the arms of the union. Perhaps it is about the death of idealism and hope, helped along by industrial work in a dying industry?



Well, I work the double shift
In a bookstore on St. Clair
While he pushed the burning ingots
In Dofasco stinking air
Where the truth bites and stings
I remember just what we were
As the noon bell rings for
Blackhawk and the white winged dove

Hold on to your aching heart
I'll wipe the liquor from your lips
A small town hero never dies
He fades a bit and then he slips
Down into the blast furnace
In the heat of the open hearth
And at the punch clock, he remembers
Blackhawk and the white winged dove

I remember your leather boots
Pointing up into the sky
We fell down to our knees
Over there where the grass grew high
Love hunters in the night
Our faces turned into the wind
Blackhawk, where are you know?
Blackhawk and the white winged dove

We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove
We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove

Do you still have the ring I gave
On the banks of Lake Black Bear?
Where I felt certain that I knew you
My cool and distant debonair
Now we drink at Liberty Station
Another cup of muscatel
Wrapped in the strong arms of the Union

Raisin' kids from raisin' hell
I remember your leather boots
Pointing up into the sky
We fell down to our knees
Over there where the grass grew high
Love hunters in the night
Our faces turned into the wind
Blackhawk, where are you know?
Blackhawk and the white winged dove

We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove
We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove
We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove
We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove
We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove
We were Blackhawk
And the white winged dove.

-- Bob Barnetson