Hazel Dickens, a trailblazer for women in bluegrass music, who captivated audiences with her high, lonesome vocal style and was widely recognized for her contributions to music and for championing the cause of coal miners and working people, died on April 22. She was 75.
The eighth of 11 siblings in a poor, hardscrabble mining family (her father – an occasional banjo player and Baptist preacher, drove trucks for a mining company), Dickens grew up in Mercer County, West Virginia, where she sang in the church choir and listened to the Grand Ole Opry. As a teenager, Dickens followed two of her brothers when they moved to Baltimore in the 1950s. It was there that she met the late singer and folklorist Mike Seeger and later, his wife, Alice Gerrard, a classically trained singer who shared her interest in old-timey country music, with whom she recorded two albums for Folkways Records between the mid-1960s and early-1970s (with two later albums being compiled from previous recordings). With Dickens on upright bass and Gerrard on guitar and sharing vocals, Hazel and Alice toured extensively on the folk and bluegrass scene throughout the country during a time when bluegrass bands were dominated by men.
The cover of a Smithsonian Folkways recording
When the duo parted ways in 1976, Dickens continued her singing career. She released several albums for Rounder and appeared on a number of compilation albums during a solo career that spanned four decades. Besides being known for the strength, conviction and raw honesty of her voice, Dickens was a gifted songwriter, whose compositions have been covered by such artists as Hot Rize, Laurie Lewis and Dolly Parton. Her song “Mama’s Hand” was recorded by Lynn Morris and was named Song of the Year at the 1996 IBMA Awards. Among her other notable compositions were “Black Lung,” “Coal Tattoo,” “Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There,” “A Few Old Memories,” “My Better Years,” “Old Calloused Hands,” “They’ll Never Keep Us Down,” and “Working Girl Blues.” As those titles suggest, Dickens’ passionate support for workers, the union movement and women’s rights, as well as her concern for the plight of Appalachia, figured prominently in her songs. Through her songs, Dickens gave voice to the voiceless and downtrodden. Working Girl Blues also is the title of a book about her life and music on which she collaborated with country music historian Bill C. Malone (University of Illinois Press, 2008).
Four of Dickens’ songs about mineworkers were featured in the soundtrack of Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary Harlan County, USA (1976). Ten years later, Dickens appeared and sang the a cappella ballad, “Hills of Galilee,” in Matewan, John Sayles’ film about the massacre of striking coal miners in Appalachia. She also was in Maggie Greeenwald’s Songcatcher (2000) and was the subject of a 2001 documentary, It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song, which is also the title of a 1987 recording for Rounder. Dickens also contributed songs to the soundtracks for other movies over the years.
During her lifetime, Dickens received a number of awards for her contributions to music. Notable among them are a 2001 National Heritage Fellowship and a 2008 National Heritage Award from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 from what is now Folk Alliance International. She also was the first woman to receive an Award of Merit from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 1993 for contributions to bluegrass music and the 1998 Traditional Female Vocalist award in the Washington D.C. area’s WAMMIE Awards. Dickens was inducted into the Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Greats in 1995 and was among the first inductees into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame in 2007.
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