hypersongs

Hazel Dickens

A West Virginia singer, songwriter and bass player from a coal-mining family who, with Alice Gerrard, made the first bluegrass records by women, and whose songs of miners and working women include "Mama's Hand".

Montcalm to Baltimore

Hazel Jane Dickens was born on June 1, 1925 in Montcalm, West Virginia, the eighth of eleven children in a mining family; her father was a Primitive Baptist minister and banjo player. Wikipedia and MusicBrainz give 1925, though many obituaries say 1935, which also changes the age they give at her death. In the 1950s she followed an older sister to Baltimore and worked in a factory, and through her brother Robert she met Mike Seeger. Around 1958 she and Seeger left Bob Baker's bluegrass band, and through the 1960s she was part of the Baltimore and Washington bluegrass and folk scene. She played double bass, guitar and banjo.

With Alice Gerrard she made Who's That Knocking (Folkways, 1965) and Won't You Come and Sing for Me (Folkways, 1973), reissued together as Pioneering Women of Bluegrass (Smithsonian Folkways, 1996), and Hazel and Alice (Rounder, 1973) and Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (Rounder, 1976); the duo ended in 1976. She also appeared on Strange Creek Singers (Arhoolie, 1970) with Seeger, Tracy Schwarz and Lamar Grier.

Songs for working people

After 1976 she worked alone, writing more political songs, among them "Black Lung", for her brother Thurman, and "Coal Mining Women". She contributed songs to the 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., including "They'll Never Keep Us Down", and later appeared in Matewan (1987), Songcatcher (2000) and the documentaries It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song and Radical Harmonies. Her Rounder albums of the 1980s are Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People, By the Sweat of My Brow and It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song, with the compilation A Few Old Memories (1987), and in 1998 she made Heart of a Singer with Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny Hawker.

She was the first woman to receive the International Bluegrass Music Association's Merit Award (1994 on Wikipedia, 1993 in another source), a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow in 2001, a Folk Alliance International lifetime achievement honoree in 2002, and, with Alice Gerrard, an inductee of the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017. The New York Times called her a clarion-voiced advocate for coal miners and working people. Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens, with Bill C. Malone, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2008. She died in Washington, D.C. on April 22, 2011.

Albums

  • A Few Old Memories 1987 · compilation · Rounder

    A Rounder compilation of eighteen songs from her three 1980s solo albums, with a new recording of "Pretty Bird".

Songs

  • A Few Old Memories A Few Old Memories · 1987

    The title track of her 1987 Rounder compilation, written by Dickens.

  • Mama's Hand A Few Old Memories · 1987

    Her song of leaving home, named song of the year at the 1996 International Bluegrass Music Awards in a version by Lynn Morris.

Sources

  1. Hazel Dickens, Wikipedia
  2. Hazel Dickens, a pioneering woman in bluegrass music, Acoustic Music Scene (2011-04-24)
  3. A Few Old Memories, DeadDisc
  4. Hazel Dickens, MusicBrainz