16 Tons

[hittman]

Having lived with my grandparents the first 10 or so years of my life, I musta heard them spin this 45 hundreds upon hundreds of times. Not to mention if I got to stay up late with them on a Friday or Saturday night I could join them in watching TV shows like Porter Wagoner with Dolly Parton or Johnny Cash. Those of course came late after a heaping dose of Hee Haw featuring Buck Owens and Roy Clark!

Gotta tell you …… my grandparents woulda never believed 16 Tons would be done like this!

 

[Sagebrush Burns]

...just excellent!

 

[Jeepnik]

Well that certainly sucked!

 

[blume357]

Not bad and always a great song.... interesting they even with all the electric rock they kept the same timing as Tennessee Ernie.

Now I do have to say and I know it's not the same, but in high school during the summer for 2 years I worked in a peach packing plant and we averaged 18 hours a day and I packed the 3/4 bushel boxes into the tractor trailers and usually it was around 60 tons a day I did. This was by hand, no fork lift.

 

[GasGuzzler]

Jeff Beck still wearing no sleeves and the Reverend Willie G hasn't shown his head with no hat in three decades...

 

[Ale-8(1)]

Nice work. Well-done production.

 

[6GUNSONLY]

I love it ! I like old school country but also came of age in the 70s so hard rock is in my blood, too. Gonna share this with my brother and sister.

 

[Jagdhund]

I remember seeing Ernie Ford sing that song on TV many times.

 

[hittman]

And neat that they played that video while performing this cover.

 

[Watertender]

The version by a Ukrainian Bass Singer is great. Merle Travis wrote 16 Tons and Tennessee Ernie Ford did the most famous rendition.

 

[Jeepnik]

Not bad and always a great song.... interesting they even with all the electric rock they kept the same timing as Tennessee Ernie.

Now I do have to say and I know it's not the same, but in high school during the summer for 2 years I worked in a peach packing plant and we averaged 18 hours a day and I packed the 3/4 bushel boxes into the tractor trailers and usually it was around 60 tons a day I did. This was by hand, no fork lift.

Don't know what those boxes weighed. But just after I was discharged I worked on the docks. Being a newbie I pretty much got bananas. The ships came in three times a week like clockwork.

The boxes were 40# +/-. They were packed from the keel to the deck. With intermediate decks They knew just how high they could stack them without crushing those below.

You literally tunneled down and out. As soon as you tunneled down to the next decks hatch it was pulled. You could have three or four decks working at a time.

The boxes were put onto manual rollers and pushed to the hatch From there they were placed onto a vertical conveyor and taken topside to be loaded into trucks or rail cars.

This work was so physically demanding you work an hour on an hour off with a three hour lunch. You were paid for 8 hours. I never figured out how many tons of bananas I did a day, but it was surely in the tons.

Of course there were other cargos like cotton and steel. But at least with those you didn't have to worry about banana spiders and Fer De Lances. Boas were no big deal. They weren't generally biters.

 

[ammo dave]

Bless your pea pickin’ heart!

 

[WAYNO]

Some songs should never be covered...

 

[Joe Chartreuse]

Of course the vocals were horrendous, but I sort of enjoyed the the guitar work- if I didn't think of it as that song.