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# Two Guns
- URL: https://noahpression.com/songs/two-guns/
- Published: 2026-10-05T00:03:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T16:59:47.000Z
- Description: For Sid Hatfield of Matewan, who took no bribes and paid for it.
- Author: Noah Pression
- Tags: My Words and Music, Storytime EP, #pair-two-guns

Sid Hatfield was born in eastern Kentucky in the 1890s, distant kin to "Devil Anse" Hatfield of the Hatfield and McCoy feud. He worked his father's farm, went into the mines as a teenager, and became a blacksmith. In 1919 the mayor of Matewan, West Virginia, made him chief of police. Both men stood with the miners who were trying to join the union.

On May 19, 1920, Baldwin-Felts detectives hired by the coal company came to Matewan to throw striking miners' families out of their company houses. Sid met them at the railroad depot. When the shooting stopped, ten people were dead, among them seven of the detectives and the mayor. Sid was tried for murder and acquitted. A year later he was called to answer a different charge in the county seat of the next county over. On August 1, 1921, he walked up the courthouse steps in Welch with his wife, his deputy Ed Chambers, and Ed's wife. Neither man was armed. Baldwin-Felts men shot them both dead.

I wrote "Two Guns" because Sid's story is usually told as a gunfight, and it is really a story about who the law belongs to.

## Lyrics

In the year of the Christian Lord, eighteen and ninety-three,  
deep in eastern Kentucky, Becky could not wait to meet

her newborn baby boy. She called him William Sidney.

But distant kin to the devil himself, Sid was born into the sword,  
and when he came, he came out ridin', guns ablaze into this world,

two guns ablaze into this world.

From the farm to the mine,  
to the anvil and gun,

a fighter and resistor,  
wore the star and scars of old Matewan.

From the farm to the mine,  
to the anvil and gun,

a fighter and resistor,  
wore the star and scars of old Matewan.

And take no Baldwin-Felts bribes or any of their shit,  
so when agents came to start a fight, well, Sid, he blazed right in,

for if you fuck with Matewan miners or their wives and kids,  
you'll be greeted at the station by the two guns of Smilin' Sid.

Oh, yeah!

In the year of the Christian Lord, nineteen and twenty-one,  
Sid rode up to the courthouse unafraid and ungunned

to stand trial on bogus charges from the fight he justly won.

But as he made his way to the courthouse steps, Sid was ambushed from the west  
by coward gun-thug union busters who put four bullets in Sid's chest,

four bullets in his chest.

From the farm to the mine,  
to the anvil and gun,

a fighter and resistor,  
wore the star and scars of old Matewan.

For the Matewan men and women, for the UMWA,  
a hero and a legend, long will live his name,

two guns ablazin' from the grave.