Women in Bluegrass Newsletter Archive, Reader’s Edition

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Hazel Dickens

Hazel Jane Dickens (June 1, 1925 – April 22, 2011) was a singer, songwriter, guitarist, and bassist from Montcalm, Mercer County, West Virginia. She was the eighth of eleven children in a coal-mining family, and her father was a Primitive Baptist minister who played banjo. She moved to Baltimore in the 1950s and worked in factories there. Through her brother Robert, she met Mike Seeger, and through him she met Alice Gerrard. As the duo Hazel & Alice, Dickens and Gerrard recorded Who's That Knocking (1965) and Won't You Come and Sing for Me? (1973), and then two albums for Rounder in the 1970s. Her songs covered coal mining, labor, and women's lives. They include "Black Lung," written about her brother Thurman, as well as "Coal Mining Women," "Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There," and "Mama's Hand." Lynn Morris's recording of "Mama's Hand" won IBMA's Song of the Year. Dickens appeared in and contributed four songs to Barbara Kopple's 1976 documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., and she sang in John Sayles's 1987 film Matewan. Her solo albums include Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People (1980) and Heart of a Singer (1998), the latter made with Ginny Hawker and Carol Elizabeth Jones. In 1994 she became the first woman to receive IBMA's Merit Award, later renamed the Distinguished Achievement Award. She received a National Heritage Fellowship in 2001 and an honorary doctorate from Shepherd College. She died in Washington, D.C., in 2011. She and Gerrard were inducted into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2017. She convincingly and consistintly lied about her age for many years leading to many sources mislabeling her birth year as 1935.

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  • Hazel Dickens Speaks (No. 16)

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