Working Girl Blues
The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Hazel Dickens was an Appalachian singer and songwriter known for her superb musicianship, feminist country songs, union anthems, and blue-collar laments. Growing up in a West Virginia coal mining community, she drew on the mountain music and repertoire of her family and neighbors when establishing her own vibrant and powerful vocal style that is a trademark in old-time, bluegrass, and traditional country circles. Working Girl Blues presents forty original songs that Hazel Dickens wrote about coal mining, labor issues, personal relationships, and her life and family in Appalachia. Conveying sensitivity, determination, and feistiness, Dickens comments on each song, explaining how she came to write them and what they meant and continue to mean to her. Bill C. Malone’s introduction traces Dickens’s life, musical career, and development as a songwriter, In addition, Working Girl Blues features forty-one illustrations and a detailed discography of Dickens’s commercial recordings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Still churning out songs "that challenge the easy complacency and corporate arrogance of our time," influential Appalachian singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens has devoted her life to writing music not just about "the predictable themes of bluegrass-mama, the old home place, the distant but cherished past," but "questions of estrangement, survival, human dignity, and social and economic justice that concern us all." This slim biography, which includes many black and white photographs, lyrics and personal notes from Dickens, as well as a complete discography, chronicles her personal and professional life. Malone, an author and Tulane University history professor, illuminates the life of a "sensitive and discerning child of the poor" who overcame "a society that discouraged women from expressing themselves," and, over the decades, ended up speaking out for many. Dickens's stories, accompanying her song lyrics, provide additional insight into her heritage ( "Coal Miner's Grave," "West Virginia My Home"), personal experience and eccentric voice: "Scraps from Your Table," she says, is "one of those nasty smart-alecky songs that I like to write." This tribute to Dickens's life and work will interest bluegrass fans and activists.
