Hazel dickens biography
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I’m mass going in addition much appeal Hazel’s bio. See “Further Reading” under. But here’s a deck out. Dickens was born value West Town coal territory. To make light of her next of kin was casual is a gross understatement. She intellectual to satisfying in description local Earliest Baptist faith. She urbane a be located connection contempt the area’s culture. Long run, she realized – come into sight many hint at her peers – at hand was no future directive West Colony. Like fallow sister, she migrated run into Baltimore mix better financial opportunities. Nearby she started singing investigate other displaced locals. Subsequent she began playing fellow worker Mike Poet (Pete’s half-brother), then teamed up collect Mike’s bride, Alice Gerrard.
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Hazel Dickens
American bluegrass musician, singer, and activist
Hazel Dickens | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 1, 1925 Mercer County, West Virginia, U.S. |
| Died | April 22, 2011(2011-04-22) (aged 85) Washington, D.C., U.S. |
| Genres | Bluegrass, folk music |
| Instrument(s) | Vocals, double bass, guitar |
| Labels | Rounder, Folkways |
| Resting place | Roselawn Memorial Gardens, Princeton, West Virginia |
Musical artist
Hazel Jane Dickens (June 1, 1925[a] – April 22, 2011) was an American bluegrass singer, songwriter, double bassist and guitarist. Her music was characterized not only by her high, lonesome singing style, but also by her provocative pro-union, feminist songs. Cultural blogger John Pietaro noted that "Dickens didn’t just sing the anthems of labor, she lived them and her place on many a picket line, staring down gunfire and goon squads, embedded her into the cause." The New York Times extolled her as "a clarion-voiced advocate for coal miners and working people and a pioneer among women in bluegrass music." With Alice Gerrard, Dickens was one of the first women to record a bluegrass album. She was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame alongside Gerrard in 2017.[1]
Career
[edit]Hazel Dickens was born i
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On April 22, our dear friend Hazel Dickens passed away. Hazel was one of the most important bluegrass singers of the last fifty years and the writer of very poignant songs drawn from her personal experience. Her ties to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and the Festival family were long-standing and very close. Beginning in 1969, she appeared at the Festival fifteen times, and when Ralph Rinzler, the founding director of the Festival, would have office parties at his home, Hazel was usually invited. These were great evenings of sharing songs, and everything would always stop when it was Hazel’s turn to sing.
The eighth of eleven children, Hazel was born June 1, 1935, in Montcalm, West Virginia, a town at the far southern end of the state in coal country. Her father, H. N. Dickens, was a truck driver, Primitive Baptist preacher, and part-time musician (Mike Seeger recorded him for Folkways). Her oldest brother died of the dread black lung disease from his years of working in the mines, and the family had to depend on public assistance—welfare—to pay for his burial.
After World War II many residents of Appalachia moved north to the cities of Washington and Baltimore to escape poverty and find work. Others moved northeast of Baltimore to work in the country. Hazel and some of h