Hazel Dickens, Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny Hawker

Dickens, born in 1925 in Mercer County in the coalfields of southern West Virginia, had learned to sing in the unaccompanied style of the Primitive Baptist church and was known for her duets with Alice Gerrard and her songs of the mining country. Hawker, born in southern Virginia, had also grown up hearing Primitive Baptist singing, at her grandparents’ church, and learned harmony from her father, Ben Hawker; she settled in Gilmer County, West Virginia, after the state folk festival at Glenville in 1977. She first met Dickens at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, where she had gone because Dickens’s voice reminded her of the singing she grew up with, and over the years the two had chances to sing together. Jones, from Berea, Kentucky, and later of Lexington, Virginia, sang traditional mountain music, played guitar and wrote new songs in the old style; she also recorded with James Leva as Jones & Leva.

Hawker has recalled that the head of Rounder heard her sing with Dickens at a Folk Alliance conference and suggested that the two record together, and that Jones was brought in to supply a high voice. The album was recorded at Lion and Fox Recording in Alexandria, Virginia, in December 1997 and May 1998, engineered by Ronnie Freeland, and produced by the three singers with Ken Irwin and Freeland. Ron Stewart played fiddle, with banjo or mandolin on a few songs; Pete Kennedy, guitar; Barry Mitterhoff, mandolin; and Marshall Wilborn, bass. Dudley Connell added guitar on four songs, Bruce Molsky played clawhammer banjo on “Lay Me to Rest” and guitar on “Times Are Not What They Used to Be,” and Lynn Morris played clawhammer banjo on “Coming Down from God.” Jody Stecher wrote the liner notes, and Jones called the result “a hard core mountain vocal album.”

The leads are shared. Dickens sings Woody Guthrie’s “Forsaken Lover,” Bill Bryson’s “Love Me or Leave Me Alone,” “Faded Pressed Rose” and her own “I Can’t Find Your Love Anymore.” Hawker leads Wade Mainer’s “Not a Word of That Be Said,” Jenny Lou Carson’s “Jealous Heart,” Dickens’s “Old River” and the two traditional pieces, which she arranged with Dickens and with Jones. Jones takes “Lay Me to Rest,” Steve Young’s “Old Memories Mean Nothing to Me,” her own “Let Me Go” and “Coming Down from God,” by Molly O’Day and Lynn Davis. Some of its duets and trios were later included on Rounder’s anthology of women in bluegrass, O Sister. Dickens died in 2011. Hawker went on to record with Kay Justice and with her husband, Tracy Schwarz, and in 2024 received the Vandalia Award, West Virginia’s highest folklife honor.