James King
A Few Old Memories
“A Few Old Memories” is a Hazel Dickens original, released as the title track of her 1987 Rounder Records album A Few Old Memories. Dickens (1925–2011) was one of the most influential songwriters of late-20th-century bluegrass — a West Virginia-born singer whose writing combined the older Appalachian song-tradition with sharp contemporary social commentary on labor, women’s rights, and Appalachian poverty.
The song belongs to Dickens’s body of personal-loss material rather than her more politically pointed work. The lyric’s premise — a singer surrounded by a few old memories of a relationship that has ended — sits in the standard country-bluegrass heartbreak idiom, but Dickens’s spare lyrical economy and her distinctive vocal phrasing give the song a particular emotional weight that distinguishes it from more conventional treatments.
“A Few Old Memories” has become one of Dickens’s most-covered compositions, recorded notably by Dolly Parton (whose version brought the song to a wide country-radio audience) and James King among many others. Dickens was inducted into the IBMA Hall of Fame in 2017, posthumously, in recognition of her songwriting and her decades of work as one of the genre’s most distinctive voices. The song remains a regular at jam sessions where pickers want a contemporary bluegrass-vocal piece with strong emotional weight.
