You'd never know it now, but that was then, when the union tried to make a stand. So sings Steve Earle in his rewrite of the well-known West Virginia ballad "John Henry was a Steel-Driving Man." Some of us who didn't grow up in Appalachian mining culture know of those times through the radical protest songs to which the participants put contemporary ideological sentiments to traditional mountain music. Today, with coal mining in calamitous decline, West Virginia seeks its salvation in the reactionary effusions of Donald Trump, a false god if there ever was one.

Earle has never mined coal, and his roots are in Texas, where he grew up, and New York City, where he's lived for some years after a detour in Nashville. He says of Ghosts of West Virginia: "I thought that, given the way things are now, it was maybe my responsibility to make a record that spoke to and for people who didn't vote the way that I did. ... I wanted to do something where that dialog could begin."

The late John Prine had a host of fans who didn't vote as he did; yet he was always surprised that they didn't know he was a Democrat, which should be obvious enough to anyone who pays any more than passing attention to his songs. By way of contrast, while Prine's persona was of a big teddy bear, Earle's songs sometimes bear an edge of menace, hinting at a ferocity whose meaning cannot be mistaken when it takes on capital punishment, unjust wars and -- as here -- the brutal, exploited lives of miners.

Earle released his first major album, Guitar Town, in 1986 on the MCA label. A man of multiple talents, he has since worked occasionally as actor and producer and written a novel. He has also continued to release albums at a steady rate. I have most in my collection. Some are better than others, as the saying goes. There are songs of enduring worth along with others that seem tossed off, usually relationship exercises that feel like holdovers from his days as a Nashville hack trying to market material to charting country singers. On those occasions one experiences a feeling familiar enough to those exposed to singer-songwriters: they're writing too much, even when inspiration is missing. It always shows.

In his best moments -- there are quite a few of them -- Earle is a champ. Ghosts is 10 cuts' and half an hour's worth of that best, and his finest album of originals in a while. (His previous album, with his longtime band, the Dukes, was Guy, a celebration of the late Guy Clark's songs. I reviewed it here on 18 May 2019.) Earle wrote the first seven songs for use in the soundtrack of a documentary titled Coal Country. Much of the content is based on two notorious mining disasters in the state, one at Sago (January 2006), the other at Upper Big Branch (April 2010). Neither is mentioned by name on the album.

Unlike many of his contemporaries in the singer-songwriter trade, Earle is well-versed in the folk tradition. The songs here are based in oldtime music, albeit in updated arrangements that sometimes integrate rock rhythms into older sounds. Banjos and fiddles figure prominently. One thinks of something like an Appalachian equivalent to the formidable English electric-folk bands Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. Earle's narrators are miners or their wives (usually widows). In the latter category Duke member Eleanor Whitmore sings the coldly beautiful "If I Could See Your Face Again," an emotionally complex exploration of love, grief and regret.

The final three songs carry on West Virginia themes. "Fastest Man Alive," however, quickly removes the singer from the state where he was born and drops him in the California desert, where one day he will be the first test pilot to surpass the sound barrier. Earle sets Chuck Yeager's story to an unexpected but dazzling rockabilly beat that relieves the listener of the accumulated gloom and outrage engendered by just about everything else, however worthy and memorable, on Ghosts.