Working Girl Blues Read online

  Working Girl

  Blues

  MUSIC IN AMERICAN LIFE

  A list of books in the series appears at the end of this book.

  Working

  Girl

  Blues

  The Life and Music

  of Hazel Dickens

  Hazel Dickens

  and Bill C. Malone

  University of Illinois Press

  Urbana and Chicago

  Words and music for all songs in this book by Hazel Dickens.

  Copyright Happy Valley Music, BMI. Used by permission.

  © 2008 by the Board of Trustees

  of the University of Illinois

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickens, Hazel.

  Working girl blues : the life and music of Hazel Dickens /

  Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone.

  p.cm. — (Music in American life)

  Includes discography (p.) and index.

  ISBN 978-0-252-03304-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 0-252-03304-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-252-07549-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 0-252-07549-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Dickens, Hazel. 2. Country musicians—United States—Biography.

  I. Malone, Bill C. II. Title.

  ML420.D547A3 2008

  782.421642092—dc22[B] 2007046952

  Bill Malone dedicates this book to his wife, Bobbie, and to the memory of his mother, Maude Owens Malone.

  Hazel Dickens, with fond memories, dedicates this book to her mother, Sarah Aldora Simpkins Dickens, and father, Hillary Nathan Dickens; and also to her ten brothers and sisters—with a special mention and dedication to her brother Arnold Lee Dickens, who shared her interest and passion for a music that will always ring in their souls.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Hazel Dickens: A Brief Biography by Bill C. Malone

  Songs and Memories by Hazel Dickens

  Mama’s Hand

  A Few Old Memories

  You’ll Get No More of Me

  West Virginia My Home

  My Better Years

  Working Girl Blues

  Scars from an Old Love

  Lost Patterns

  Scraps from Your Table

  Beyond the River Bend

  Won’t You Come and Sing for Me

  Only the Lonely

  Rambling Woman

  Your Greedy Heart

  Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There

  It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song

  I Love to Sing the Old Songs

  Old Calloused Hands

  Rocking Chair Blues

  Pretty Bird

  Mount Zion’s Lofty Heights

  Cowboy Jim

  Little Lenaldo

  Tomorrow’s Already Lost

  I Can’t Find Your Love Anymore

  Hills of Home

  Old River

  Will Jesus Wash the Bloodstains from Your Hands

  They’ll Never Keep Us Down

  Mannington Mine Disaster

  Coal Miner’s Grave

  Black Lung

  Coal Mining Woman

  The Yablonski Murder

  Clay County Miner

  My Heart’s Own Love

  America’s Poor

  Freedom’s Disciple (Working-Class Heroes)

  The Homeless

  My Love Has Left Me

  A Hazel Dickens Discography

  Index

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Hazel Dickens’s music has always stirred my soul, but the bulk of my knowledge about her career came through formal interviews, written exchanges, telephone conversations, and dialogues that the two of us had in seminars that I conducted in the spring of 2000 as a visiting professor at Duke University and the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill. The most gratifying aspect of this association, however, has been the opportunity to get to know her personally and to share the warmth of her friendship. It has been a pleasure for me to work with Hazel Dickens, one of America’s premier traditional singers and musicians, in the preparation of this tribute to her long and distinguished career as a songwriter. I would also like to thank John Cohen, Alice Gerrard, Archie Green, Judy McCulloh, Tracy Schwarz, and Mike Seeger for their willingness to share their memories and insights about Hazel. Other sources of information are found in the endnotes to the introduction that I have written for this book.

  —Bill C. Malone

  I have admired and have been moved by Bill Malone’s writing for many years. So, to have the honor and privilege to share a book with him is more than I could ever hope for. Thank you Bill for all your great writing and soulful insights and especially for the gift of your friendship—I shall always treasure it. A very special thank you to some dear music friends: Mike Seeger, Dudley Connell, Alice Gerrard, Tracy Schwarz, John Cohen, Barry Mitterhoff, Jack Leiderman, Richard Underwood, Lynn Morris, Marshall Wilborn, Ron Thomason—many “kudos” to Warren Hellman, David McLaughlin, Tom Adams, Tony Treschka; and to Rounder Records for a thirty-six-year relationship. A special thank you to Ken Irwin for all your support and friendship. Many thanks to all my loyal fans who have stood by me and given me hope through the years. I will not forget!

  —Hazel Dickens

  Hazel Dickens

  A Brief Biography

  Bill C. Malone

  Hazel Dickens’s compelling voice and eloquent songs first reached a large American public in the soundtrack of Harlan County, USA, a 1976 Academy Award—winning documentary film that told of a protracted and dramatic strike in the eastern Kentucky coalfields. During a graphic description of the ravages wrought by pneumoconiosis midway through the documentary, Hazel is heard singing her own composition, “Black Lung,” a powerful elegy inspired by the death of her brother Thurman and other coal miners. Her voice—stark, keening, and persuasive—manages to convey both the suffering felt by generations of her kinsmen and her own outrage at the greed and neglect that produced such misery. There is no mistaking the sound we hear. It is not a pathetic wail, nor a dejected cry of despair. It is an angry call for justice.

  Hazel Dickens’s voice and vocal style are qualities that old-time music fans have recognized since the mid-1960s, when she joined with Alice Gerrard to break new ground for women in the field of bluegrass, a domain that had been notorious for its dominance by “good old boys.” Hazel and Alice truly were “pioneering women,”1 with passionate duets and searing songs that inspired women to invade this masculine province. Their seminal duets marked the beginning of what music historian and promoter Art Menius approvingly described as “the feminization of bluegrass.”2 Hazel’s career with Alice, though, was only the most recent phase of an almost lifetime of immersion in music. She shaped and honed her style in the rough clubs and honky-tonks of Baltimore and, before that, in the music she heard at home and in the Primitive Baptist churches of West Virginia.

  Hazel Jane Dickens was born in Montcalm, Mercer County, West Virginia, on June 1, 1935, the eighth of eleven children (six boys and five girls) in the family of Hillary N. and Sarah Aldora Dickens. Mercer County lies at the southern extremity of the state, right on the border with Virginia, and not too far northeast of the storied coal seams of Harlan County, Kentucky, where Florence Reece first raised the question that always confronts us when we witness the victimization of the poor or working class: “Which Side Are You On?” Mercer County embodies the paradox of Appalachian coal country. While it is a land of stark na
tural beauty and abundant resources, the lives of its people have too often been sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed. Its beautiful hills and valleys once held massive deposits of bituminous coal, providing jobs for struggling farmers and immense wealth for a few entrepreneurs. The county’s population, though, has declined steadily since the late 1950s, when mechanization and strip mining reduced the need for labor in the mines.

  According to family lore, the Dickens clan is related to the famous British novelist, Charles Dickens. Such an association seems fitting. Both Hazel and her distant British kinsman have had compassionate concerns for the poor and fine critical eyes for the details of working-class life. Unlike the perspective of the great English writer, who knew the downtrodden largely as a sympathetic outsider, Hazel’s awareness comes from wholly within that culture, as a sensitive and discerning child of the poor. Her father, Hillary (generally known as H. N.), cut and sold timber for mine roofing, and her brothers, brothers-in-law, and cousins worked in the mines. She grew up seeing her brothers march off to the mines each morning and return in the evening with their faces and clothes covered with coal dust. Well before she left the hills of home, Hazel had learned an even more searing truth: that the coal dust had also seeped into their lungs.

  Hardworking men like her father and brothers were exploited for their labor but were undervalued as human beings. Except when they exercised their rights at the polls or walked off their jobs to demand better treatment from their bosses, they had little voice in society. H. N. was able to exercise his authority outside of the workplace in two areas where working-class men could dominate: home and pulpit. At home, he was a stern, unyielding husband and father who asserted total and unquestioned command over his household. In the Primitive Baptist church, he was an eloquent preacher and a strong singer, and his congregation valued his leadership. During the brief moments of his sermon, no one could question his authority or his worth.

  Mother Sarah was quiet, submissive, and almost always deferential to her husband. She devoted her life to all of her eleven children, but was particularly close to her frail and sickly daughter Hazel. Hazel describes the incident that epitomized and strengthened that relationship in her comments about her award-winning song, “Mama’s Hand.” Fearing for the life of her three-month-old daughter, who would not take her mother’s milk, Sarah bundled Hazel up, carried her across the mountain to the railhead, and successfully sought out the aid of a doctor in a nearby town. The close bond that developed between mother and daughter is memorialized not only in the song written by Hazel, but also in another one inspired by the incident called “Carry Me across the Mountain.”3

  The Dickens family sought, found, and affirmed its identity through religion and music. Hazel insists that she is not very religious, and has in fact written and recorded very few religious songs. But it is easy to see the ways in which religion shaped her life and musical style. The theology of the Primitive Baptist church permeated her youth. Primitive Baptists stress the fellowship of the original New Testament church and practice a direct simplicity reflected in their unadorned church buildings and rituals. Unlike most of their Protestant brethren in the South, they reject evangelism, arguing that God has already predestined people’s fates. Church services, led by unordained preachers, dwell on the fellowship of believers and the unlimited majesty of God. Rejecting any man-made idea or institution that is not explicitly sanctioned by the Bible, Primitive Baptists exclude musical instruments from their church services. They believe that the human voice is the only instrument required for the worship of God.

  Hazel eventually rejected the strictures of the church, feeling that the fatalism inherent in its theology and the tendency to attribute all good things to the wondrous workings of God diminished the worth and potential of human beings. She felt that such a restrictive theology inhibited people, preventing them from seeing the utility of their own actions. On the other hand, she revered the democracy of the church and recalls with great affection the fellowship and love exhibited by church people for each other— the communion and camaraderie, for example, exhibited by the “brothers” and “sisters” as they greeted each other on Sunday mornings or repaired to each other’s homes for a noon meal. And, of course, she was powerfully impressed by the rough and lusty expression of equality heard in the music of the church. Singers generally sang in unison, eschewing harmony probably because they felt that “pretty singing” glorified the singer instead of the song and its spiritual message. Hazel vividly recalls the powerful singing of her father, regretting that she has never been able to replicate his manner of dwelling on notes and “turning” the syllables in marvelous ways. Songs heard in church—such as “Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah” and “When I Can Read My Titles Clear”—taken most often from D. H. Goble’s venerable songbook, Primitive Baptist Hymn Book (1887), glorified God and noted the futility of man’s actions. Primitive Baptist lyrics reminded worshipers of the evanescence of life, the certainty of death, and the promise of heavenly reward. This was a tough-minded religion entirely appropriate to the spiritual needs of a people who lived hard and unadorned lives.

  Like religion, music insinuated itself into Hazel’s consciousness from the very beginning. The music of the church was important, but it was not the only force that shaped her life. H. N. had been a strong drop-thumb banjo player in his youth, and his religious convictions did not prevent him from loving and appreciating the music of this world. Hazel awakened each morning to the music of the radio, played loudly because H. N. loved it that way. He was particularly fond of any kind of music that featured the banjo. Consequently, musicians such as Uncle Dave Macon, Lily May Ledford, and Cousin Emmy (Joy May Carver) ranked high in his pantheon. Above all, he encouraged music among his children. The family listened to the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights and to the Carter Family on Mexican border broadcasts. Hazel still cherishes the Carter Family’s music. Her guitar style is modeled on that of Maybelle Carter, and she regularly includes songs from the Carter Family repertoire in her concerts. The radio also brought more modern country songs into the Dickens’s household, and by the time Hazel left home for Baltimore, she and her brothers had become immersed in the music of people like Roy Acuff, the Callahan Brothers, the Blue Sky Boys, the Louvin Brothers, Bill Monroe, and Ernest Tubb.

  Hazel exhibited her own musical talents quite early. Her father loved to hear her sing “Man of Constant Sorrow”; when she was a small child, he called her out often (generally to the embarrassment of the shy young girl) to sing the song for visitors and relatives. She also recalls singing an Ernest Tubb song, “I’d Die before I’d Cry over You,” in one of her elementary school classes, to the considerable consternation of her teacher, who had hoped for something with a bit more “quality” to it. Hazel clearly loved a broad range of country music, from the very traditional to the honky-tonk melodies of Texas. To this day she still proudly displays on the wall of her apartment a framed picture of the great Texas country and western singer George Jones. Very early in her life, Hazel also began collecting songs, some painstakingly written down in composition books and others clipped from the pages of song magazines. This immersion in song lyrics soon inspired Hazel’s attempts to write her own songs, a portent of the distinguished career that lay ahead of her. By the time she left home in 1954, she had already acquired a vast repertory of songs learned from family, the radio, and magazines like Country Song Roundup.

  Although religion could sustain folks through hard times and music could provide diversion, neither could forestall the disintegration of the Dickens family’s way of life and the breakup of their home. The mechanization of the coal industry after World War II and the consequent spread of hard times accentuated the flight of mountain folk to the industrial promises of Cincinnati, Akron, Dayton, Detroit, and other northern cities. After 110 years of uninterrupted growth, the population of Mercer County peaked at 78,000 in 1950. Things went from bad to worse during the grim 1950s as coal production became domi
nated by strip mining, and Mercer County lost population during the next four decades. The Dickens family moved frequently, usually to smaller houses, and finally into a sharecropper’s shack consisting of three rooms: a kitchen, a living room where her father’s bed was, and another room “full of beds” where everyone else slept. One by one, members of the Dickens clan began to relocate to Baltimore, one of the most popular destinations for transplanted West Virginia hill folk.

  Eventually, even H. N. and Sarah made the move to join their children in the city but found no real comfort or economic security there. Hazel briefly had joined the exodus to the city in about 1951 at the age of sixteen. Then, after returning to West Virginia a short time later, she made a permanent move in 1954. Her sister Velvie, who had been living and working in Baltimore since the war (first as a shipyard welder and later as a factory hand), encouraged her to move, telling her about all the creature comforts that were available in the city. Adorned in a new dress that her brother Dan bought for her at the company store, Hazel “said good-bye to that plain little mining town” and caught a Greyhound bus to Baltimore. Like many migrants, she abandoned the old home with mixed feelings; often “in the dead of the night and the still and the quiet,” poignant memories returned, summoning up those ancient, dark mountains and the sight of her mother waving good-bye from the doorway as Hazel left their house to go to the bus station.

  Baltimore was both exciting and forbidding. Hazel first lived with Velvie at Eutaw Place in a neighborhood of row houses that had been built earlier in the century for workers who toiled in the sail-making industry. When Hazel began making a little money, initially as a housekeeper and waitress and then as an operative in the Continental Can factory, she moved to an apartment in a neighborhood called Lower Charles Village. These neighborhoods were often described as “Little Appalachia,” and Hazel lived among people very much like herself, and found comfort in their familiar dialects and customs. Despite the presence of a support network made up of people from back home, Baltimore remained a lonely, and sometimes hostile, place for a young woman who had grown up in the country. She recalls that when she first set out to find an apartment, she actually saw a sign on a building that said “No dogs or Hillbillies.” Hazel came from a society that discouraged women from expressing themselves. She was an intelligent young woman, but had only gone through the seventh grade. She was sensitive, with good instincts and a latent social consciousness, but she was aware of the limitations of her education and was hesitant to divulge her deepest thoughts. Like her father, she tended to repress her feelings for long periods and then might explode in a paroxysm of anger. When she ventured out of her neighborhood, she was self-conscious about the clothes she wore, her accent, and her manners. She now speaks often of her lack of socialization back in the hills; that is, the fact that she had lived a largely isolated life, had developed few skills of interpersonal communication, and had been discouraged from expressing herself freely.