Working Girl Blues
Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens
Hazel Dickens
Bill C. Malone
Series: Music in American Life
Copyright Date: 2008
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Pages: 144
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcrjn
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Book Info
Working Girl Blues
Book Description:

Hazel Dickens is 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 of her songs, 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, and the book features forty-one illustrations and a detailed discography of her commercial recordings.

eISBN: 978-0-252-09097-4
Subjects: Music
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  1. Front Matter
    Front Matter (pp. i-vi)
  2. Table of Contents
    Table of Contents (pp. vii-viii)
  3. Acknowledgments
    Acknowledgments (pp. ix-x)
    Bill C. Malone and Hazel Dickens
  4. Hazel Dickens: A Brief Biography
    Hazel Dickens: A Brief Biography (pp. 1-30)
    Bill C. Malone

    Hazel Dickens’s compelling voice and eloquent songs first reached a large American public in the soundtrack ofHarlan 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...

  5. Illustrations
    Illustrations (pp. None)
  6. Songs and Memories
    Songs and Memories (pp. 31-86)
    Hazel Dickens

    People took to this song like no other that I’ve ever sung. Of course in bluegrass you hear a lot of songs about mother. I’ve gotten more responses, more nice sentiments about this song than any other song. Lynn Morris, whose version won the IBMA’s Song of the Year award in 1996, says the same thing. For some reason, almost every time I sing it, I can see people in the audience with tears in their eyes.

    There was a very special bond between me and my mother. When I was three months old, I developed this condition where I...

  7. Illustrations
    Illustrations (pp. None)
  8. A Hazel Dickens Discography
    A Hazel Dickens Discography (pp. 87-98)
  9. Index
    Index (pp. 99-102)
  10. Back Matter
    Back Matter (pp. 103-110)
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