Working Girl Blues (3 page)

Alyse was crucial to Hazel's socialization, but music was her salvation. She and her brothers first made music at home and then in the house parties
that flourished in Baltimore. Through her brother Arnold, Hazel met a second significant mentor, Mike Seeger. Seeger had arrived in Baltimore in May 1954 and, as a conscientious objector to the Korean War, had begun a stint of “community service” as a kitchen orderly at the Mt. Wilson Tuberculosis Sanatorium. He quickly let it be known at the hospital—where he was also living and where Hazel's brother Robert was a patient—that he played music. That was quite an understatement. Seeger was just twenty-one and had been playing the guitar only since he was eighteen. But by the time he came to Baltimore, he was playing just about anything with strings on it and was on the way to becoming an extraordinary student of the music he played and sang. Robert introduced Mike to his brother Arnold, and disclosed that his family was musical. Seeger soon visited the Dickens home and brought Hazel a new dimension of musical awareness and creativity.

Born in New York City in 1933, Seeger had grown up in the household of Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger, prominent classical composers and ethnomusicologists, and was the half brother of the charismatic protest singer Pete Seeger. The family moved to the Washington, D.C., area in 1935, when Charles Seeger began working as a folk music consultant for the New Deal's Resettlement Administration. Mother Ruth was similarly involved; she made musical transcriptions for a book of folksongs,
Our Singing Country,
compiled by John and Alan Lomax. Almost from infancy Mike had been immersed in the traditional music that his parents documented and studied. Library of Congress recordings and old 78 rpm commercial records of hillbilly and other roots styles were as important to his childhood as toys were. He began to listen to commercial country music, particularly its older forms, when he was a high school student in Chevy Chase, Maryland. At that time, country music was not yet rigidly subdivided into subgenres, with what is now called bluegrass played alongside other types of country music at concerts, on radio broadcasts, and in jukeboxes. By listening to the local radio broadcasts of country music and bluegrass in the D.C. area and hearing the informed commentary of disk jockeys like Don Owens and Curley Smith, Seeger began to see the connections between traditional styles and modern commercial country music. Two young friends from the Washington area, Pete Kuykendall and Richard Spottswood, who were avid record collectors and fans of roots-style music, indoctrinated him on the fine points of early bluegrass history and style.
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Mike's urban middle-class experience, however, had never really permitted him to have much intimate contact with the working-class folks who made the music that he had come to love. This all changed in Baltimore, a working-class city that was teeming with people fresh from the rural hinterlands. As a cultural bridge, the TB sanatorium proved to be as important to Seeger as it was to the Dickens siblings. Robert Dickens played a kind of hillbilly ragtime style on the mandolin that hearkened back to an earlier, pre-bluegrass period of country music. The first meeting with the Dickens clan, as Mike recalls it, was in the apartment of H. N. and Sarah Dickens, who had relocated in Baltimore at Eutaw Place, near Charles and Calvert streets. Hazel was living nearby with her sister, but came over to her parents' house because she was “curious about this guy” who wanted to meet them. Remembering the insults that she had often suffered from people in the big city, Hazel responded to Mike with extreme wariness, and recalls that she first “checked him out” cautiously and tried to figure out why this “Northerner” was so interested in her family. At one point, when Mike and Arnold were picking and singing, she turned up the volume on a country music radio show to which she was listening and loudly declared,
“This
is what it should really sound like.” They smiled at her abruptness, kept on playing, and were soon joined by Hazel. Mike declares that he was immediately impressed with both Hazel's singing and by her commitment to the music. She brought out her songbooks, including the few tentative efforts that she had been making toward writing her own songs. Mike remembers Hazel as being both shy and assertive in those years, self-effacing in her personal behavior but boldly expressive in her singing and choice of songs. Here, he believed, was a woman with an inner reservoir of strength and wisdom that was too often masked by her reserved exterior.

Mike, Hazel, Arnold, and Robert Dickens began playing at home and in other informal settings. But the public performance bug quickly bit them. Thinking of the local honky-tonk scene, Robert would say, “Let's go put in a personal appearance.” Often that meant nothing more than standing in the corner of some club, picking and singing and hoping that someone would pitch some money in the kitty. Hazel jokingly named the band the West Virginia Ramblers and became its spokesperson because the others were reluctant to talk very much in public. Occasionally, they would pack a lunch and drive to the country music parks at New River Ranch and Sunset
Park in Maryland and Pennsylvania, hoping to hear Bill Monroe or the Stanley Brothers or to get in a little picking time themselves.
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Ola Belle Reed, a North Carolina–born singer and banjo player and the proprietor of New River Ranch, was a vital role model for Hazel with her strong singing of such eloquent songs as “High on a Mountain” and “I've Endured.” The parks were crucial cultural meeting grounds for northern fans who came from the metropolitan centers of the East and rural folk who came from the contiguous areas of the Upper South. Although she knew how to play the guitar, Hazel soon learned that she could get more jobs playing the bass fiddle, so she learned that instrument as well. Her first real band experience came with the Pike County Boys, a group headed by Bobby Baker on guitar and including Mike Seeger on fiddle, Dickie Rittler on banjo, and Bob Shanklin on mandolin.

Like Washington, D.C., Baltimore was in the throes of a musical revolution in the late fifties. On the cusp of the folk revival, the city served as an incubator of the emerging bluegrass phenomenon. Fledgling bluegrass bands like the Pike County Boys, more seasoned groups like Earl Taylor and the Stoney Mountain Boys, and veteran professional acts like Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers played in bars like the Cozy Inn, the Blue Jay, and the 79 Club, small establishments with makeshift stages and a jukebox. This was the music scene, in fact, that inspired folklorist Alan Lomax when, in
an Esquire
article in 1959, he described bluegrass as “folk music with overdrive.”
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The years in the Baltimore clubs provided a great learning experience for Hazel. She was intrigued by the young city fans and the musicians, like Mike Seeger, who loved the music that she made. Mike was the first person from outside her life experience who appreciated the music that she had always loved. He had, in short, “validated” her culture.
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Seeger, on the other hand, is just as quick to acknowledge the transforming experience that Hazel and the rural musicians that he came to know and admire in Baltimore exerted on his own life. In the clubs and parties of that city, Hazel saw how music could bring people together, promote identity, and provide emotional release. But recalling those days at the Cozy Inn and other clubs, she understood but was dismayed at the frustration and machismo exhibited by the good old boys from the country, who asserted their manhood in a world that was slipping from their grasp. These displaced souls were in the city,
but not yet of it. Underpaid, overworked, and powerless in many ways, they found a bar on almost every corner in Baltimore and they drank too much, sometimes fought each other, and harassed women. Hazel keenly observed the ways women were treated. If women came to the bars, men treated them as if they were prostitutes, talking about them behind their backs while trying to exploit them sexually. Hazel did not drink. She nursed her cokes, played and sang her music as well as she could, and then went home-alone.

The men from the North tended to be more appreciative of her talents and more accepting of her as a person than were her Southern male counterparts who felt threatened by her assertiveness, self-confidence, and intelligence. “I had one thing that most of the good old boys didn't have. I had a mind. I had every song that you could think of in my head, and they didn't. People were always asking me for the words of songs, and I could sing them authentically, just the way they were supposed to be sung.” She added, “The men who did accept me were the ones that wanted to learn, the ones from the North. I had that in my corner. They all wanted to learn and sing with me. So I never lacked an audience, particularly among the revivalists and city people. But the good old boys, they weren't ready to move over and give me room.”

The seeds of Hazel's women's songs, then, did not germinate in the larger field of American feminism, nor did they arise through conscious identification with the women's movement. They first flowered in the honky-tonks of Baltimore, a product of the treatment she received from many of her fellow musicians and from club owners who often paid her less than they gave to the male members of the band. The songs also stemmed from her awareness of the abuse suffered by other women in her own family and by those who came to or worked in the clubs. She said, “I didn't have to work in a factory to see how badly women were treated. Playing in bluegrass, a male-dominated form of music, was enough.” She eventually memorialized these experiences in some of her greatest songs, perhaps most poignantly in “Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There.”

Hazel's evolution toward greater individual assertiveness came, ironically, during her partnership with Alice Gerrard.
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Alice was born in Seattle but grew up near Oakland, California, in a family that loved music but was totally indifferent toward traditional or country styles. Bach, not bluegrass,
was the reigning musical passion of her household. Her mother and older sisters had sung professionally in a group called the Symphony Sisters. When Alice entered Antioch College in Ohio in 1956, she began hearing various forms of folk music and was hooked for life when she encountered, first, a version of “One Morning in May” by the great Virginia traditional singer Texas Gladden, and then the legendary collection of southern roots styles found
in Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music.
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Participation in an Antioch co-op program in Washington, D.C., where she was placed in contact with “real-life” situations, put her in the middle of an active scene of old-time and bluegrass performance, both amateur and professional; through her boyfriend, Jeremy Foster (whom she later married), she met Mike Seeger. Alice has no clear recollection of where she and Hazel met, but Hazel is positive that the meeting occurred on Eager Street in Baltimore in a room below Alyse Taubman's apartment and on the same floor where Mike lived.

Hazel and Alice did not sing together for quite some time after this first meeting. But when they eventually combined their voices in harmony, they found remarkable compatibility as singers. As unlikely as this musical partnership between the city girl and the mountain girl might have appeared, Alice's husky and soulful contralto voice meshed perfectly with Hazel's ringing tenor, convincingly reinforcing each other's individual strengths. Their penchant for interesting and rare songs, drawn from the folk revivals and old-time country music, made the duo favorites at picking parties in the Baltimore–Washington, D.C., area.

Except for a well-received performance in 1962 at the venerable old-time fiddlers' contest in Galax, Virginia, where they performed mostly Carter Family songs with autoharp and guitar, their musical activities for several years remained confined largely to the active house party scene of Baltimore and Washington. But one night in 1964, at a party in Virginia, David Grisman and Peter Siegel heard the duo and arranged an audition for them with Moe Asch of Folkways Records. The subsequent recording session, held in Pierce Hall of the First Unitarian Church in Washington, marked the real beginning of the team of Hazel and Alice. Featuring a stellar array of blue-grass musicians—Grisman on mandolin, Lamar Grier on five-string banjo, and Chubby Wise on fiddle—an LP called
Who's That Knocking?
(Verve/Folkways 9005) appeared in 1965. Although Hazel contributed one song called
“Cowboy Jim” and verses for another, “Gabriel's Call,” to which Jeremy, Alice, and Marj Seeger (Mike's wife) had already supplied a chorus, most of the songs on their first LP came from traditional sources, including five songs borrowed from the Carter Family. This recording was followed by another session that same year, but the resulting LP,
Won't You Come and Sing for Me?
(Folkways 31034), was not released until 1973. Folkways recorded a wonderful assortment of grassroots styles in the 1940s and 1950s, but seemed content to place its records mostly in libraries. Marketing was not its forte or desire.

After the release of the first Folkways LP, Hazel entered the busiest period of her life. The years between the issuance of the two Folkways items, from 1965 to 1973, saw a period of personal growth and social maturation, and it was a time of incredible artistic production. In 1965, Hazel married Joe Cohen, an easygoing youth counselor, taxi driver, and folk music fan. At the time, both were in retreat from the cultures in which they grew up. When they divorced in 1968, both of them were moving back toward the cultural roots from which they had strayed: Cohen expressed a renewed interest in Judaism and even talked about moving to a kibbutz in Israel, and Hazel, in turn, began to overcome her embarrassment about her rural roots and to commemorate them in some of her most stirring songs.

After her divorce, she moved in late 1969 to an apartment in Washington, D.C., deliberately choosing a scene of semi-isolation and privacy where she could devote her time to songwriting. She took a job as manager of a retail store, Old Mexico Imports; she said that holding down a regular job allowed her to support her music habit. Working in the privacy of her little apartment, Hazel entered a period of great creativity, turning out some of her most important songs, such as “Black Lung,” “Mannington Mine Disaster” (inspired by a tragic incident in Farmington, West Virginia, in 1968, that took the lives of seventy-eight miners), and “Working Girl Blues,” which first began to take shape one day while she was taking inventory at Old Mexico Imports. In the liner notes of the album on which the song first appeared, she dedicated it “to all working class people” and noted that the song was the result of “remembering and reliving all the bad jobs I've held from the time I was sixteen.”
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