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Growing up, I didn't know anybody who didn't have a miner in the family. Both of my grandfathers were miners.

A distant cousin sent me some genealogy report on my father's side, and it's sort of what I suspected. Coal miners for generations... four or maybe five generations.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

My great-grandfather was a coal miner, who worked in Pennsylvania mines when carts were pulled by mules and mines were lit by candles. Mining was very dangerous work then.

My grandfather was from Aberdare. He was a coal miner who emigrated and then continued mining in Pennsylvania.

My father and brothers were in the military.

I came from a very, very small valley in the middle of South Wales. I grew up there with my father, who's a coal miner, and my mother worked in a normal factory.

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.