Dumpin’ the Slag: The Sydney Steel Plant in a Mid-Twentieth Century Song

A narrow moment of mid-twentieth-century optimism in Sydney, Nova Scotia, brought about by the end of wartime rationing, two successful labor actions, and the sense that bourgeois cosmopolitanism was within the grasp of the heretofore-marginalized industrial city was captured by one contribution to a local song contest. Aileen Stephen’s “Dumpin’ the Slag,” set to “Casey Jones,” lovingly negotiated the sensory overload of living in the shadows of the Sydney Steel Plant. That loving negotiation turned to ironic self-justification when post-industrial decline and the plant’s environmental legacies put an end to the optimism. This article places the song in the context of the complex perception of the plant and the city at this pivotal transition period in Atlantic Canadian history.