Writing and Inspiration
Barry and Robin Gibb wrote the song when they were sitting on a darkened staircase at Polydor Records following a power cut. The echo of the passing lift inspired them to imagine that they were trapped in a mine. The song recounts the story of a miner trapped in a cave-in. He is sharing a photo of his wife with a colleague ("Mr. Jones") while they hopelessly wait to be rescued. According to the liner notes for their box-set Tales from the Brothers Gibb (1990), this song was inspired by the 1966 Aberfan mining disaster in Wales. In the second and third verses, the lyrical lines get slower and slower, as if to indicate that life is about to end for the miners. According to Robin, there actually had also been a mining disaster in 1939, but not in 1941.
Read more about this topic: New York Mining Disaster 1941
Famous quotes containing the words writing and/or inspiration:
“England has the most sordid literary scene I’ve ever seen. They all meet in the same pub. This guy’s writing a foreword for this person. They all have to give radio programs, they have to do all this just in order to scrape by. They’re all scratching each other’s backs.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and heart of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)