"Sixteen Tons" is a song about the life of a coal miner, first recorded in 1946 by American country singer Merle Travis and released on his box set album Folk Songs of the Hills the following year. A 1955 version recorded by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one in the Billboard charts, while another version by Frankie Laine was released only in Western Europe, where it gave Ford's version competition.
Read more about Sixteen Tons: Authorship, Cover Versions, Foreign Language Versions, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words sixteen and/or tons:
“O but we talked at large before
The sixteen men were shot,
But who can talk of give and take,
What should be and what not
While those dead men are loitering there
To stir the boiling pot?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“People think that at the top there isn’t much room. They tend to think of it as an Everest. My message is that there is tons of room at the top.”
—Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925)