Working Girl Blues (5 page)

In planning their second Rounder release, Ken Irwin was conscious that Hazel and Alice were reaching well beyond the bluegrass mainstream. Aware of the press that Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and their cohorts were receiving in the early 1970s because of their maverick and independent-minded behavior, and realizing that young fans were gravitating toward
such artists, Irwin conceived a marketing campaign that would present Hazel and Alice as “female outlaws.” But shortly before the appearance of the second Rounder LP in 1976—
Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard—
Alice announced that she was leaving the act to pursue her own independent musical interests. Hazel was deeply disappointed with Alice's departure, but she already had a separate career and identity. The songs recorded for the Highlander project in 1972 (
Come All You Coal Miners
) led directly to Hazel's involvement with the documentary
Harlan County, USA.
Documentary film producer Barbara Kopple, who had previously heard the songs ultimately included on the album, commissioned Hazel to sing some of her songs for the movie's soundtrack and to write a new piece for the concluding scene. “Mannington Mine Disaster,” “Black Lung,” and “The Yablonski Murders” (inspired by the 1970 execution-style killings of a maverick UMW leader, Jock Yablonski, and his wife and daughter) appeared on the soundtrack, as did the new song, “They'll Never Keep Us Down.” Unlike her other songs, which arose from personal inspiration and emerged after lengthy periods of reflection and germination, “They'll Never Keep Us Down” provided a real challenge because it was written on demand. The song's popularity contributed further to Hazel's self-confidence and her conviction that she was mastering the craft of songwriting. Released in 1976 to critical acclaim,
Harlan County, USA
introduced Hazel to a new audience and prompted a wave of concerts, including a prerelease showing in Harlan, Kentucky, in the hall where the striking miners had met and appearances at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and at various rallies for miners in other sections of coal country.

Hazel's active schedule introduced her music to a wide variety of audiences, but her varied projects took their toll, emotionally and physically. She had been maintaining her full-time job at Old Mexico Imports since 1969, struggling to balance work time with her musical performances. She had traveled frequently by bus to Pennsylvania for rehearsals with Alice and the Strange Creek Singers, and had gone almost every weekend to Baltimore to see her aging and ill parents. They passed away within a few months of each other, at the end of 1978 and in early 1979. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, Hazel was hospitalized in 1979 with an undiagnosed stomach problem, a disorder that was probably a result of overwork and stress. When she recovered, she made the decision to quit her job and
live on the income from her music alone. Abandoning earlier intentions to buy a house, she settled down in her small apartment, canceled her credit cards, and resolved to live even more frugally than she had in the past. She vowed to make music on her own terms and conditions and to accept only those jobs that she really wanted to play. Since that time, she has chosen not to employ a regular band but instead has hired musicians when they are needed. Fortunately, there has been no shortage of fine musicians and singers, such as Ron Thomason, Lynn Morris, Barry Mitterhoff; her old friends Mike Seeger, Tracy Schwarz, and Ginny Hawker; and the former members of the Johnson Mountain Boys, who are more than ready to back her up. As an occasional singing partner, Hazel needed someone with strength, range, and passion—in short, someone who could match her own power. She told Ron Thomason that she wanted “a gutsy lead singer to work with. A lot of women don't sing hard enough. It's because of their conditioning.”
¹⁷
She found her ideal singing partner in Dudley Connell. Connell grew up in Rockbridge, Maryland, and had been a founder and longtime member of the traditional bluegrass band the Johnson Mountain Boys; after 1995, he was part of the progressive bluegrass group Seldom Scene. Connell was a fine guitar player who possessed a tenor voice that attacked notes with a searing intensity.

Hazel's relationship with Rounder Records has been mutually productive and advantageous. She did more than simply record a series of fine LPs for the company; she virtually became the chief adviser to the label, especially concerning bluegrass and old-time music. Acknowledging that he was sometimes naive in his understanding of people's motives and intents, Ken Irwin learned to lean heavily on Hazel for advice concerning potential artists and the type of song material that should be recorded. Hazel, Irwin said, had an “almost uncanny ability to see the truth or lack of it in people.” She often sat in on auditions, and sometimes traveled with Irwin to find songs or to hear new musicians (a role that Hazel had in fact played with Mike Seeger when she accompanied him south in 1956 and 1957 on his search for old-time musicians). Hazel has been associated with Rounder throughout most of its history, as it evolved from the obscurity of a counterculture collective to prominence as an independent record label with an international circulation. She was present on the historic day in 1985 when fourteen-year-old Alison Krauss, Rounder's most prominent star, was signed
to the label, and was at the
Grand Ole Opry
in 1993 on the night that Krauss joined that show.

Since 1980, Hazel has enjoyed a distinguished career, one conducted on her own terms: deliberately and moderately paced. Her recordings have been infrequent but have been marked by distinction and uncompromising integrity. Her first solo recording, in 1981, included her trademark mixture of hard country songs and protest material. The album's title,
Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People
(Rounder 0126), was borrowed from a book of protest songs compiled by Alan Lomax,
¹⁸
but could easily describe the contents of Hazel's lifelong repertoire. In the liner notes, Ralph Rinzler described Hazel's music as “art of timeless and enduring values” and declared that “it had been put to work for the benefit of people faced with struggle.”
By the Sweat of My Brow
(Rounder 0200) came in 1984, and It's
Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song
(Rounder 0226) in 1987. In that same year, Rounder released Hazel's first
CD, A
Few Old Memories
(Rounder 11529), which contained previously recorded material taken from earlier albums. Although Hazel recorded songs occasionally for thematic anthologies, such as
Coal Mining Women
(Rounder 4025), which also included Florence Reece, Sarah Gunning, and Phyllis Boyens, and
Don't Mourn, Organize! Songs of Labor Songwriter Joe Hill
(Smithsonian Folkways 40026), where she sang “Rebel Girl,” she did not return to the studio for a major session until 1996, when she joined with friends Ginny Hawker and Carol Elizabeth Jones to record the critically praised
Heart of a Singer
(Rounder 0443).

These scattered recordings certainly did not connote inactivity. Hazel resisted involvement in the grueling scheme of one-night stands, but nevertheless continued to present her music in a wide range of venues and before a variety of audiences that are among the most diverse enjoyed by any country singer. Movie soundtracks, for example, continued to provide valuable access to new audiences. Independent filmmaker John Sayles had been aware of Hazel's music since he first heard it in
Harlan County, USA,
but he was reintroduced to her singing through the LP
Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People.
In 1986, he asked Hazel to sing for a movie he had produced and directed,
Matewan,
about the massacre of striking coal miners in West Virginia in 1920. She was heard (but not seen) singing “Fire in the Hole” and “Beautiful Hills of Galilee,” a song learned from a Primitive Baptist
hymnal and that played as the closing credits rolled. Hazel also made a striking cameo appearance, singing “The Gathering Storm” at an open-casket funeral for a miner. Actors and film crew alike were emotionally moved by the scene. Sayles described the incident to writer Bill Friskics-Warren. As the scene was being set up on a hill overlooking a West Virginia holler, on a day marked by mist and rain, Hazel told Sayles and the assembled cast about the similar funerals of her brother and cousins who had died from black lung. Although “The Gathering Storm” had been written by someone else for the movie, Hazel transformed it into a haunting Baptist hymn. The moment was so poignant and powerful that, for a brief moment, the contrived event seemed like a real funeral.
¹⁹

Although her personal appearances have been limited, they have been well chosen and have taken Hazel to Cuba, Canada, Australia, and Japan (illness prevented a scheduled trip to Russia) as well as to an array of prestigious American venues, such as the Kennedy Center, the Brooklyn Academy for the Performing Arts, the Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden, and the Library of Congress. She has continued to perform periodically at folk music festivals and similar settings—such as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the Appalachian Festival in Cincinnati, the Brandywine Folk Festival in Delaware, the Calgary Festival in Canada, the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, the Hardly Strictly Blue-grass Festival at Golden Gate Park, and the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. Hazel also maintains her links with the bluegrass community through her popular workshops and late-night picking parties at the International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) conventions each October. The audiences at these affairs include the predictable mix of people who have followed her career since the days of Hazel and Alice or who have learned about her through her music's presence in movie soundtracks or from the publicity surrounding the awards that she has won.

Hazel was greatly surprised, though, and delighted, when she discovered that her following had expanded far beyond those traditional parameters. An invitation to perform in 1998 at Twangfest in Pittsburgh, a gathering of alt. country bands and fans, informed her that a youthful array of rock-nurtured listeners was discovering and turning on to her music. That interest had been anticipated, in fact, as early as 1976 when the country-rock band, New Riders of the Purple Sage, recorded “Don't Put Her Down” on
one of their albums.
²⁰
More recently, other musicians with ties to the country-rock or underground-country scenes, such as Freakwater, Hazeldine, and Exene, have also recorded some of her songs. Allison Wolfe, of the all-women punk band Bratmobile, has not sung Hazel's material, but she identified strongly with her and noted that Hazel's music played frequently in her house during her childhood.
²¹
It seemed clear that the youthful audience that had made icons of such musical rebels as Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson was also beginning to recognize a similar courage and rock-ribbed honesty in Hazel's music.

Hazel's commitment to social justice has not been dampened by her successes, nor has her conviction that music should be put to the service of working people's welfare. She has continued to sing occasionally at strike benefits and other kinds of labor rallies. For example, she sang in New York on behalf of efforts to unionize the powerful southern textile manufacturer J. P. Stevens, and of course could always be depended on to sing for coal miners in their struggles. One of these campaigns took her to the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill in 1989, where she shared the stage with the radical British folksinger Billy Bragg, singing on behalf of the striking Pittston miners. At still another Pittston rally on a rainy and dreary day, Hazel arrived late and feeling ill, and without a chance to change clothes. After she offered apologies, the reply made by a coal-miner's wife reminded her of why she felt so committed to working people's justice: “Why, honey, you look just like us.” The bonds of sympathy and recognition of common origins embodied in the woman's statement do much to explain the comment Hazel once made to a writer: “If I have a religion, that's it: to take what I have, and be able to share it with somebody that needs it. If there's any religion in my life, it's for the working class. And I want to be that way as long as I have a breath.”
²²

The tribute made by the miner's wife was probably as much praise as Hazel desired. It was not simply a validation of her lifetime work; it was also a valuable reminder of her enduring link to the culture of her youth. Other formal awards and tributes, however, have come often in the past twenty years. It was appropriate that Hazel would be invited to the White House on Labor Day in 1980, with President Jimmy Carter as host. But this tribute to her career as a champion of working people's rights is only one of several prestigious honors that she has received. Her cherished bluegrass world
has rewarded her achievements in various ways. The Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America (SPBGMA) named her to its “Hall of Greats” in 1995. The International Bluegrass Music Association has not yet named her to its “Hall of Honor” (the bluegrass equivalent of country music's Hall of Fame), but it gave her a Merit Award in 1993, and she is treated like a matriarch at its annual conventions each October. In 2002, the National Folk Alliance presented to Hazel their Lifetime Achievement Award. In 1998, Shepherd College in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, awarded her an honorary doctorate in the humanities, and in September 2001, she received the nation's highest cultural accolade when the National Endowment for the Arts awarded her a fellowship and a $10,000 prize. Hazel became the subject of a sixty-minute video documentary in 2002 when Mimi Pickering produced her biography for Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. This celebration of her life and music was appropriately entitled
It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song.

As rewarding and prestigious as these awards might be, they may not be as satisfying as the events that feature Hazel in both entertainment and educational roles. Increasingly, Hazel has deepened the content of her performances. Whether presented from an auditorium or festival stage, or in a college or university classroom, Hazel's concerts appear as mini-tributes to her life's work and as educational forums that permit her to sing and talk about her mountain origins, her painful adjustment to city life, her compassion for working folk, and the ways in which these experiences have shaped her craft of songwriting. These fusions of concert and tribute had occurred as early as July 1996, when the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife presented “Hazel Dickens: A Life's Work.” Fittingly, the symposium was organized by Kate Rinzler, the widow of Ralph Rinzler, who had been so instrumental in the shaping of Hazel's career and who had first presented her in coal-mining symposia several years before. For more than four hours, such musicians as Ginny Hawker, Kay Justice, Tracy Schwarz, Laurie Lewis, Lynn Morris, James King, Kate Brislin and Jody Stecher, the Dry Branch Fire Squad, and Alice Gerrard sang and reminisced about their relationship with and indebtedness to Hazel. The evening ended appropriately when Dudley Connell, and a reconstituted version of the Johnson Mountain Boys, joined Hazel in a stirring concert of some of her most memorable songs.