The miners' hymn "Gresford" is a gentle lament for the worst that can happen in the industry, as we have seen again in New Zealand this week. Silence greets its performance by brass bands, and often tears, as listeners think of the wall of fire which trapped 254 men down Gresford colliery, near Wrexham, in 1934.

Against all the industry's traditions, their bodies were not recovered and remain sealed off more than half a mile underground. The gas-filled crannies of the wrecked pit, which killed three members of a rescue team and later a surface worker when the concrete cap on a shaft blew off, have always been too dangerous for anyone to return.

The heart is wrenched by Robert Saint's memorial music, the subject of this fascinating book by a shipwright's son, later a senior Observer journalist, who encountered the miner-turned-composer when he was a boy. But the head faces a famous difficulty with "Gresford". The hymn's words, added later by an unknown writer, are all but unsingable. "We stood there looking at one another," a veteran tells Peter Crookston, in one of the book's outstanding collection of interviews. "We just couldn't make the words fit the music."

The mismatch is an apt metaphor for British mining's history, whose music is the bravery and comradeship underground and the exceptional sense of community in the villages around the pitheads. Tony Benn, who chose "Gresford" on Desert Island Discs in 1989, gives Crookston a telling comparison between the City of London's culture of outsmarting everyone else, and miners' dependence for survival on mutual trust.

But the head rebels, too, at the ultimate emptiness of praising such virtues for their own sake while saying go hang to economics, including the role of capital in making mining possible at all. Crookston quotes the former miner and Labour pioneer Keir Hardie, rather than some Tory, on "the weight of the past in the miner's mind, behaviour, customs and habits" as "a great obstacle to progress and development".

The book's many insights include a comparison between United States mining "camps"  communities based on an acknowledgment of the limited life of almost all collieries  and British "pit villages", which use one of the oldest, cosiest and most settled words in English. After the second world war, when Labour planners created a new town with new industries to replace the finished pits of West Durham, even naming it after Peter Lee, the miners' representative at the Gresford inquiry, pit villagers responded with flyposters saying "Peterlee is a nightmare, not a dream".

These tensions were personified in Robert Saint himself, a brass band composer of the first rank who stayed modestly on his patch, first as a miner, then an army bandsman and finally as the regional organiser of the National Equine (and Smaller Animals) Defence League. He gave the royalties from "Gresford" to the National Union of Mineworkers and left scarcely any personal traces. Not even a shoebox of papers, as Crookston says sadly, although the book's memories of Saint's former fairground caravan, complete with coal-fired stove, parking next to the Crookston family's home-made contraption in a field near Morpeth, are luminous.

Saint did leave another legacy. His grandson David is a professor of music at Birmingham City University and currently acting principal of the city's Conservatoire. That flowering of talent away from the villages, like Crookston's own, is another mismatch of "words" and "music", another paradox of the pits. Coal not dole? Or no child of mine will go down the pit? The Pitmen's Requiem explores and explains, but does not judge. Readers will be left thinking for a long time.

Martin Wainwright's books include True North: In Praise of England's Better Half (Guardian Books).