Hazel Dickens wrote “A Few Old Memories” and recorded it in Nashville on 23 January 1986 for It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song, the Rounder album she produced with Ken Irwin. On her recording, Tommy Goldsmith plays guitar and Russ Barenberg lead guitar, with Jerry Douglas on dobro, Blaine Sprouse on fiddle and Roy Huskey Jr. on bass. In 1987 Rounder used the song as the opening and title track of A Few Old Memories, a compilation of her recordings from the previous decade.
Dickens was born in Montcalm, West Virginia, in 1925, into a coal-mining family, and died in 2011. She is best known for pro-union and feminist songs. “A Few Old Memories” is a personal song. A few old memories slip “in through the door” that the singer thought she had closed tightly, and she can’t understand why they should bother her mind when they belong to “another place and time.” She takes stock of what is left: a few keepsakes on the shelf that she says mean nothing, love letters with the edges gone brown, and an old faded picture she keeps turned upside down. By the last verse she is crying without knowing why and surprised at herself, and she settles on a plan: first thing tomorrow morning she’ll clean off that shelf.
James King recorded it on Lonesome and Then Some (Rounder, 1995), with Dudley Connell singing tenor. Dolly Parton put it on The Grass Is Blue (Sugar Hill, October 1999), with Patty Loveless and Rhonda Vincent singing harmony. It was the album’s first single, and the album won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album. Tim O’Brien sang it on Where the River Meets the Road (2017), and the Tuttles with A. J. Lee recorded it on Endless Oceans (2013). The International Bluegrass Music Association inducted Dickens into its Hall of Fame in 2017, together with her longtime duet partner Alice Gerrard.
