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Reviewed by:
  • Working Girl Blues: The Life & Music of Hazel Dickens, and: Sing It Pretty: A Memoir
  • Josh Guthman
Working Girl Blues: The Life & Music of Hazel Dickens By Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone; University of Illinois Press, 2008 144 pp. Cloth $60.00; paper $17.95
Sing It Pretty: A Memoir By Bess Lomax Hawes; University of Illinois Press, 2008 216 pp. Cloth $65.00; paper, $19.95.

Midway through Harlan County, USA, the 1976 Academy Award-winning documentary about a coal miners' strike in eastern Kentucky, an old miner sits in a lawn chair panting for breath. The camera cuts to a doctor who patiently delivers the diagnosis: pneumoconiosis, the gradual destruction of the lungs caused by long-term exposure to coal dust. But it is Hazel Dickens's song "Black Lung," which is intercut with the doctor's stolid analysis, that tells us all we need know:

Black lung, black lung, your hand's icy cold,As you reach for my life and you torture my soul. [End Page 103] Cold as that waterhole down in that dark cave,Where I spent my life's blood digging my own grave.

Sung a cappella in that magpie voice of hers, "Black Lung" sounds like burial hymn and reads like an indictment. It is, like so many of Dickens's songs, a measure of her singular ability to fuse the cadences of southern mountain music with the insistent demands of the picket line and the union hall.

Born in 1935 to an imperious Primitive Baptist preacher and his submissive wife, Dickens came of age in the West Virginia coalfields where so many of her family members and neighbors worked. As a child she learned to play guitar and, along with her ten brothers and sisters, absorbed the sounds of old-time songsters, such as Uncle Dave Macon, and modern country stars like Ernest Tubb. But as Working Girl Blues makes clear, Dickens's musical identity owes at least as much to Baltimore, where she moved when she was nineteen years old, as it does to the hollers and mines of Appalachia. In Baltimore, Dickens forged ties with the local bohemian community, began performing in the city's honky-tonks, and befriended Alice Gerrard, with whom she would record several landmark albums of old-time and bluegrass music during the 1960s and 1970s.

In the biographical essay that begins Working Girl Blues, the country music historian Bill Malone tells this story with his usual clarity and concision, but the book's real treat is its second part where Dickens herself reflects on the origins and meanings of forty of her songs, from working-class anthems and feminist broadsides, such as "They'll Never Keep Us Down" and "Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There," to classic country laments like "Only the Lonely" and "My Love Has Left Me."

By 2001, when Dickens was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Heritage Fellowship, Bess Lomax Hawes, who had been instrumental in creating the award, had long since been retired. Hawes is not nearly as well known as her song-collecting brother, Alan, and their father, John, though perhaps her new memoir will go some way to rectifying that imbalance. In the early 1940s, just after she graduated from Bryn Mawr, Hawes spent several years as a member of the Almanac Singers, teaming with Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and husband-to-be Butch Hawes, among many others, in a group that drew on a panoply of southern song styles—hillbilly, blues, church hymns—for their performances at union meetings, political rallies, and urban hootenannies.

But Hawes's performance career was short-lived and so her autobiography dwells mostly on a lifetime spent as a folklorist, teacher, and—dare I say it?—bureaucrat. Between 1977 and 1992, Hawes worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, and she has much to say about panels and policies, funding guidelines and budgetary realities. All this may send some readers scurrying for memoirs more conventionally melodramatic, but it really oughtn't. For Sing It Pretty is both [End Page 104] Bess Lomax Hawes's life story and an extended, lively, and timely...

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