New album by Peters musician Tom Breiding focuses on coal miners' lives

If not for a theme-oriented album he released in 2008, Tom Breiding’s life would have been less complicated. He was then content being a schoolteacher and releasing albums that cast him as a storyteller with a rocker’s heart. He was happily married with a young son.

Then art interceded, and his world dramatically changed.

Breiding’s “The Unbroken Circle: Songs of the West Virginia Coalfields” is a chronicle of coal miners in the Mountain State. Songs such as “Union Miner,” “Obituary of Joe Fry” and “The Bull Moose Special” cast the men and women who worked in coal mines, their hardships and plights, in sympathetic, sometimes heroic terms.

“I did it as an artistic statement,” says Breiding, who lives in Peters and is a native of Wheeling, W.Va. “I became fascinated with the history of this union” — the United Mine Workers Association — “and the primary industry of my home state.”

Robert Ketchum

Tom Breiding

That album eventually led Breiding to Wheeling Jesuit College’s Appalachian Institute, where he works as the school’s immersion trip coordinator, exposing students to varying cultures in Appalachia and visiting schools to explain the region’s history through song. He also became an outspoken advocate for coal miners on a national level, playing at rallies and benefits for the UMWA across the country.

“I was 40 years old,” Breiding says. “I was teaching and I told my wife (Janet) I’d given up a lot of opportunities. I told her I think I can build an entire career on this record. She knew of some of the sacrifices I’d made (to start a family) and she said if you don’t do it now, you’ll never do it.”

Breiding’s new release, “Love Commits Me Here,” is a quiet, engaging album that mirrors his ongoing commitment to transcendent and meaningful music. The songs — notably “Farmington No. 9,” The Flood” and “Fannie Sellins” (about a union organizer who was killed while trying to protect striking coal miners of the Allegheny Coal and Coke Company in 1919 and is buried in New Kensington) — have a quiet, sparse tenor. Breiding enlisted guitarist and engineer Dan Marcus of Squirrel Hill to flesh out the stark sound.

While the music is striking, it’s almost secondary to the impact Breiding has made. According to Phil Smith, director of communications and governmental affairs for the UMWA, when Breiding offered to support coal miners it was a godsend for the organization.

“He captured our struggle, he captured our message, he captured our hearts,” Smith says. “No one since Woody Guthrie has told American workers’ stories with the passion that Tom brings to his lyrics.”

Breiding has been especially passionate about the plight of retired coal miners who are continually in danger of losing their pensions and health care benefits, appearing at rallies for the Miners Pension Protection Act. That devotion earned Breiding an honorary membership in the UMWA.

“Other unions may want him, but we claim Tom as one of our own,” Smith says.

Breiding, who also plays guitar in Bill Toms’ band, Hard Rain, admits his life is a “dream come true,” albeit a bit surprising. Through high school and college, he never played an acoustic guitar, let alone owned one.

Now a Gibson J-45 is his trusted companion as he sings about a history and a people embedded in his heart.

“Here I am today writing meaningful songs and doing good work with my original material,” Breiding says.

Breiding’s website, tombreiding.com, contains his tour dates and more information about his work.

Rege Behe is a freelance writer.