Thomas Flannery has spent his whole life in the anthracite-coal districts of Northeastern Pennsylvania, where his lineage reaches back to survivors of the Irish famine. From this background he acquired a sharp awareness of the harsh, often sorrowful coal-mining past that marked both his personal story and that of his surroundings. At the same time he cultivated a reporter’s focus on the tiny particulars of ordinary days and an understanding of how small-town minds work. Although he postponed any serious engagement with music until his mid-twenties, by the final years of the 1990s he stood out among his peers as one of the most perceptive observers of everyday existence and one of the most skilled songwriters of his time.
He entered the world in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1966 and was raised in neighboring Dunmore by a father known locally as a capable newspaper reporter. The surrounding towns still carried the scars left by the anthracite industry. Early exposure to the Beatles did not yet turn music into a central pursuit for the teenager. Only after his older brother Pat introduced him, in his early twenties, to music that addressed social concerns did Flannery suddenly treat songwriting as both a passion and a necessary outlet. He studied Richard Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights with intense concentration, absorbing and replicating its songs until his own craft sharpened. He also absorbed the work of John Gorka, James McMurtry, Lyle Lovett, Robert Earl Keen, and Chuck Berry. Historians and chroniclers such as David McCulloch, Shelby Foote, and Charles Kuralt further shaped his outlook; Kuralt would later become the subject of one of his songs.
By the late 1980s Flannery had committed himself so fully to writing that, for an entire year, he did little besides go to work, return home, and compose. The result was an enormous catalog—hundreds of songs, sometimes two completed in a single day—covering subjects from the smallest daily observations to broader ideas. Around 1990 he met producer George Graham, who also hosted Homegrown Music, a program featuring regional artists on WVIA-FM that formed part of Mixed Bag, the nation’s longest-running adult-alternative radio series. Graham invited Flannery to perform on the show, an opportunity that both launched his public performing career and set him on the road to recording. Over the following decade Flannery appeared on the program more than fifteen times and contributed to the first Homegrown Music Sampler CD in 1997. Each appearance prompted him to prepare another dozen songs. Through these broadcasts he encountered other songwriters, and when Graham proposed a group segment featuring shared performances and discussion, the lineup included the acoustic duo Kate & CJ, reggae performer George Wesley, and Canadian singer-songwriter Lorne Clarke. Flannery formed a close association with Clarke; the two frequently shared stages in the years that followed, and Clarke helped refine Flannery’s idea for a recording project. That idea took shape in 1996 as the limited-edition cassette The Anthracite Shuffle: Reflections on an Anthracite Heritage, a sequence of original songs exploring the inheritance of his region and its long-burdened inhabitants.
In 1998 Flannery entered the studio alongside New Jersey singer-songwriter and guitarist Neal Casal—whose music Graham had urged him to cover in his newspaper column—and keyboardist John Ginty, recently returned from touring with Jewel. Together with Graham producing, they tracked Flannery’s first proper full-length release, Song About a Train. Issued in July of that year, the album drew favorable comparisons to Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, received strong notices, and earned steady airplay across the United States and Canada. The satisfying studio experience, combined with the warm response that greeted the earlier cassette, prompted Flannery to re-record every song from The Anthracite Shuffle for his second album, which appeared in 2000.
