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Hazel Dickens, legendary bluegrass singer and social activist, has died
04.23.2011
02:39 am
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Painting by Kirsten McCrea
 
Bluegrass singer and social activist Hazel Dickens has died at the age of 75.

Hazel Dickens made a difference. Born into a family of miners in Mercer County, West Virginia, Dickens was a fierce defender and advocate of the rights of women, miners, the poor and the oppressed. The songs she sang came up out of her own experience living in coal mining communities and later, when she moved to Baltimore and Washington,D.C., struggling to survive in urban environments that were strange and forbidding to a young woman raised in the mountain hollows of Appalachia.

Ms. Dickens grew up in dire poverty in West Virginia’s coal country and developed a raw, keening style of singing that was filled with the pain of her hardscrabble youth. She supported herself in day jobs for many years before she was heard on the soundtrack of the 1976 Oscar-winning documentary about coal mining, ”Harlan County, U.S.A.”

Her uncompromising songs about coal mining, such as “Black Lung” and “They Can’t Keep Us Down,” became anthems, and she was among the first to sing of the plight of women trying to get by in the working-class world. She was a key influence on such later singing stars as Emmylou Harris, Allison Krauss and the Judds.”

Dickens was the first woman to receive the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Merit Award.

This is an excerpt from the documentary Hazel Dickens: It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song directed by Mimi Pickering. The songs in the clip are the powerful and moving “Mannington Mines” and “They’ll Never Keep Us Down.”
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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04.23.2011
02:39 am
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