Working Girl Blues (6 page)

One of the most instructive of Hazel's concert/tributes came on October
8, 2003, when she appeared at San Francisco State University as the centerpiece of a program sponsored by the university's Labor Archives and Research Center, “An Evening with Hazel Dickens.” The event consisted of a concert that featured examples of all the kinds of song material performed during her career, including everything from “It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” to “Don't Put Her Down” and “Mannington Mine Disaster,” and participation in an ongoing dialogue with noted labor folklorist Archie Green about “the deeper meanings of labor songs and worker culture.” The shy little mountain girl who had left school in the seventh grade, once described herself as totally “unsocialized,” and complained about not knowing how to talk to people had emerged as a mature and articulate spokesperson for working folk.

It is presumptuous, and decidedly premature, to talk about Hazel's legacy, because her career has not yet run its course. She is still actively presenting her music to audiences throughout the nation and, at the time of this writing, is busy at work recording another CD for Rounder. Her legacy, though, will extend far beyond the occasional memorials and awards and will be measured in different ways by different people. Everyone, of course, will remember her voice and the passion that animates it, and critics will struggle to come up with words that adequately capture the eloquence that her voice conveys. Journalist Ed Bumgardner, for example, said that Hazel's voice was “as strong and chilling as a mountain wind howling across a miner's grave” and that it conveyed “the harshness of her heritage and compassion for those who have endured it.”
²³
Bill Friskics-Warren similarly noted the power that lay in her “rough-hewn wail,” but remarked further that “at its most lovelorn, Dickens' voice is also perhaps the purest embodiment of Hank Williams' lonesome whippoorwill.”
²⁴

Although people will always treasure Hazel's uncompromising voice, they will also value the contributions that she has made to bluegrass and old-time country music, women's rights, and working-class justice. But the issues that she has embraced, and the values she holds dear, are most effectively encapsulated and immortalized in the songs that she has bequeathed to us. They are celebrated in this book. Hazel has written often about many of the predictable themes of bluegrass—mama, the old home place, the distant but cherished past, the desire for independence, and love in its tragic dimensions—but she has also reached far beyond those topics
to address questions of estrangement, survival, human dignity, and social and economic justice that concern us all. This universality and awareness of the issues of her own time is what her longtime singing partner, Dudley Connell, had in mind when he said that Hazel had “raised the bar” in the writing of bluegrass song lyrics.
²⁵

The forty songs anthologized here, of course, are only a small portion of her total output, and many others will usher forth from her creative spirit before her life's work is done. But augmented by her explanations of why each song was written, the songs chosen for this book provide us with the essential ingredients to appreciate this remarkable woman and her role in documenting and commemorating the lives of ordinary people in modern America. Several years ago, another sensitive musical poet of working-class America, Steve Earle, lamented the decline of radical activism in the United States and called for the revival of a caring and compassionate society: “Come back, Woody Guthrie.”
²⁶
One can empathize with the despair conveyed by Earle's lyrics, and yet take heart from the knowledge that, in the sanctuary of her apartment in Washington, D.C., a mountain woman named Hazel Dickens is still writing songs that challenge the easy complacency and corporate arrogance of our time.

1.
This term was used as the title of the CD reissue of their first two recordings:
Pioneering Women of Bluegrass
(Smithsonian Folkways SFCD 40065).

2.
Menius was the executive director of the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) from 1985 to 1990, and was associate festival coordinator for MerleFest, an acoustic music festival held each year in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. The most important chronicler of women in bluegrass music, though, is Murphy Henry, a five-string banjoist and teacher who edits a quarterly newsletter in Virginia,
Women in Bluegrass
(522 Shawnee Trail, Winchester, VA 22602).

3.
Written by Jeff White, John Pennell, and Billy Smith, the song was most effectively interpreted by Dan Tyminski in a CD of the same name,
Carry Me across the Mountain
(Doobie Shea Records 2002).

4.
Bill Friskics-Warren, “Coal Miner's Sister,”
No Depression
20 (March–April 1999): 78.

5.
Pete Kuykendall was the founder and publisher of
Bluegrass Unlimited,
the
premier bluegrass music journal. Spottswood is best known as an authority on American ethnic styles of music. I am now writing a full-scale biography of Mike Seeger. The best overview of his musical career is Jon Weisberger, “Mike Seeger: True Stories,”
No Depression
47 (September–October 2003): 96—109.

6.
Mike Seeger also began his habit of taping musical performances at these affairs. His enormous collection of such material is housed in the Southern Folklife Collection, University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, Mike Seeger Collection, Inventory #20009.

7.
Alan Lomax, “Bluegrass Background: Folk Music with Overdrive,”
Esquire
52, no. 4 (October 1959): 103–9.

8.
Geoffrey Himes, “From the Hills,
” Baltimore City Paper On Line
24, no. 2 (January 12–19, 2000).

9.
For an overview of Gerrard's life and career, see Jack Bernhardt, “With a Song in Her Heart: The Musical Journey of Alice Gerrard,”
The Old-Time Herald
9, no. 8 (Summer 2005): 24–30.

10.
Originally issued in three boxed collections of eighty-four songs: Folkways FP 251, 252, 253. Now available on Smithsonian Folkways.

11.
Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard
(Rounder 0054).

12.
Ron Thomason, “An Open Letter to Hazel
and Alice,” Muleskinner News
(September 1974): 5.

13.
Strange Creek Singers
(Arhoolie 9003).

14.
Bruce Shapiro,
Oh, What a Time! The Southern Grassroots Music Tour
(Nashville, Tenn.: Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, 1982), 8.

15.
Hazel's transformation as a “political” songwriter is discussed by Mary Battiata in a fine article called “A High and Lonesome Sound,”
Washington Post Magazine,
June 24, 2001, 8–15, 21–24.

16.
Naomi Judd, with Bud Schaetzle,
Love Can Build a Bridge
(New York: Fawcett Crest, 1993), 124.

17.
Ron Thomason, “Hazel Dickens, Only a Woman,”
Bluegrass Unlimited
(February 1982): 23–26.

18.
Alan Lomax,
Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People
(New York: Oak Publications, 1967); the book includes a foreword by Woody Guthrie and items that had originally been collected in the 1930s.

19.
Friskics-Warren, “Coal Miner's Sister,” 83.

20.
New Riders
(MCA 2196).

21.
Michael Hudson, “Hazel Dickens Inspires New Generation of Musicians,”
Southern Exposure
31 (Spring 2004): 46–47; Hudson's article first appeared in
Womensenews,
December 12, 2003,
www.highbeam.com/doc
.

22.
Quoted in Caroline Wright, “Hazel Dickens: A Bridge between Two Worlds,”
Bluegrass Now
11, no. 12 (December 2001): 19.

23.
Ed Bumgardner,
Winston-Salem Journal,
November 3, 1989, 47.

24.
Friskics-Warren, “Coal Miner's Sister,” 74.

25.
Steve Romanoski, “Interview with Dudley Connell,”
iBluegrass.com
, September 24, 2001, 12,
www.rootsnetwork.com.bg
.

26.
The line is heard in a song written and recorded by Earle in 1997: “Christmas in Washington,”
El Corazon
(Warner Brothers 946789–2).

Hazel's paternal grandparents, John Henrey Dickens and Sarah A. Gallimore Dickens. Courtesy of Hazel Dickens. Unless indicated otherwise, all illustrations are from Hazel Dickens' collection.

Hazel's maternal grandparents, Garland Simpkins and Eliza Jane Simpkins, from Indian Valley, Floyd County, Virginia.

Wedding picture of Hazel's parents, Hillary Nathan (“H. N.”) Dickens and Sarah Aldora Simpkins Dickens.

Hazel's sisters Dovie Dickens Bailey (
left
) and Beulah Dickens Roberts in the 1940s in West Virginia. Both are now deceased.

Hazel on a visit back home in West Virginia, early 1950s.