Dave Clemo & Vince Gorman – Mexico Bound

This is another song from my as yet unreleased album of Cornish inspired songs. I wrote the words to the song in 2010 and this recording dates from 2014/5.
The song tells the all-too-common story of a young miner who was forced to go abroad to find work after the collapse of the Cornish mining industry in the mid-19th century. Miners made up the majority of the estimated 250,000 men who were forced to leave the duchy to find work. Some men moved to South Wales and the North East to work in the coal mines, but other went further afield, to the United States, Southern Africa, Australia and Central America.
The Cornish have left their mark in those countries. The Cornish pasty can be bought in parts of Mexico (it’s called a ‘paste’), and the sport of football (soccer) was introduced to Central America by miners from Camborne & Redruth in 1900.