Hazel Jane Dickens

[Robertjack]

Hazel Jane Dickens (June 1, 1925 – 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 labour, 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.

Hazel Dickens was born in Montcalm, Mercer County, West Virginia on June 1, 1925, the eighth of eleven siblings in a mining family of 6 boys and 5 girls. Many of Hazel's relatives were miners, including her brothers, cousins, and, eventually, her brothers-in-law. In the early 1950s she moved to Baltimore in search of work, and from her wages at a factory making tin cans she bought a bass so as to join her brothers in a bluegrass band playing for other Appalachian emigres. Around that time she met other devotees of old-time mountain music including Mike Seeger, younger half-brother of Pete Seeger and founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers and became active in the Baltimore-Washington area bluegrass and folk music scene during the 1960s.