Hazel Dickens

She was born on 1 June 1925 in Montcalm, a small community in Mercer County, the eighth of eleven children of Hilary Nathan and Sarah Aldora Simpkins Dickens, whose families came from Floyd and Carroll counties in Virginia. Her father hauled timber for the coal mines, preached in the Primitive Baptist church and played the banjo, and Hazel learned to sing in the church’s unaccompanied style; her brothers worked in the mines. Her schooling ended in the seventh grade. As a girl she copied the words of songs she heard on the radio and at home into composition books, a habit that became the start of her songwriting. She grew up on the Carter Family, Bill Monroe, Uncle Dave Macon, Cousin Emmy, the Stanley Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys and the Louvin Brothers, and on singers such as Molly O’Day, Lily May Ledford and Kitty Wells.

Several of her sisters had gone to Baltimore for work, and from 1951 she moved back and forth before settling there for good in 1954, working as a waitress among other families from West Virginia. Soon afterward Mike Seeger began playing with Hazel and her brothers and sisters, and regular jam sessions led to performances in bars and clubs, with Hazel on bass and singing tenor. Through Seeger she met Alice Foster, later Alice Gerrard; the two first performed together at the fiddlers’ convention in Galax, Virginia, in 1962. In 1964 Peter Siegel and David Grisman heard them at a party, and an audition tape won them a contract with Folkways. Who’s That Knocking?, made with Chubby Wise on fiddle, Lamar Grier on banjo and Grisman on mandolin, came out on Verve/Folkways in 1965 and included the first of Hazel’s songs on record, “Cowboy Jim.” At a party at Tex Logan’s home in New Jersey in June 1966 she sang tenor to Bill Monroe on “Roll in My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” a performance later issued by Smithsonian Folkways.

In the later 1960s she recorded a second album with Gerrard and sang with Seeger, Gerrard, Grier and Tracy Schwarz as the Strange Creek Singers. Their one album, issued by Arhoolie in 1972, carried the first recording of “Black Lung,” which she wrote not long after one of her brothers died of the disease. By the end of the decade she had moved to Washington, D.C., where her songwriting began in earnest. Through the 1970s she held day jobs while touring the South with Gerrard in the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, which presented integrated bills of performers to integrated audiences. The duo’s first Rounder album, Hazel & Alice (1973), included “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia,” and their second, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard (1976), “Working Girl Blues” and “West Virginia, My Home.”

When Gerrard turned to a solo career in 1976, Dickens did the same. That year four of her songs were used in the Academy Award–winning documentary Harlan County, USA, and she was soon singing at miners’ meetings and rallies and at conventions of the United Mine Workers. At the end of the 1970s she gave up her day job to live on her music, and on Labor Day 1980 she sang at the White House at President Jimmy Carter’s invitation.

Rounder released three solo albums in the 1980s. Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People (1980) mixed her own “West Virginia, My Home,” “Old Calloused Hands” and “They’ll Never Keep Us Down” with Si Kahn’s “Aragon Mill,” played by Norman Blake, and Nashville session players including Buddy Spicher and Lloyd Green. By the Sweat of My Brow (1983) added “Mama’s Hand,” with Jerry Douglas and Blaine Sprouse in the band, and It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song, recorded in Nashville in January 1986 with Allen Shelton, Mike Compton, Jim Buchanan and Roy Huskey Jr., included her “A Few Old Memories” and “You’ll Get No More of Me.” Her other songs of the mining country include “Mannington Mines.” Her music was used in Matewan, a film about the West Virginia mine wars, and later in Songcatcher, and she briefly appeared in both. In December 1997 she recorded the trio album Heart of a Singer with Carol Elizabeth Jones and Ginny Hawker, released by Rounder in 1998.

Away from the studio she became a close friend of Rounder co-founder Ken Irwin and often sat in on the label’s auditions, and she led songwriting workshops at festivals and at IBMA’s annual gathering. She performed in Cuba, Canada, Australia and Japan and, at home, at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Grand Ole Opry and the Library of Congress. A documentary about her, named after her 1986 album, appeared in 2001. She died in Washington on 22 April 2011.

• 1993: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award
• 1995: Society for the Preservation of Bluegrass Music in America, Hall of Greats
• 1996: “Hazel Dickens: A Life’s Work,” a program at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife
• 1998: Honorary doctorate, Shepherd College
• 2001: National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship
• 2002: Lifetime Achievement Award, North American Folk Music and Dance Alliance
• 2007: West Virginia Music Hall of Fame
• 2017: Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame, with Alice Gerrard