Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone (review)

When Hazel Dickens died on April 22, 2011, we lost "a pioneer in the feminization of bluegrass" (2). Thankfully, the University of Illinois Press had already published Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens. Written with the assistance of Bill C. Malone, Working Girl Blues is a facilitated autobiography accompanied by "Songs and Memories," a compilation of commentaries by Dickens on some forty of her songs, with a formal discography at the end.

In the first, or autobiographical section, of Working Girl Blues, readers learn about Dickens's life—her birth in Mercer County, West Virginia; the family removal to Baltimore, Maryland; and how she became a singer-songwriter. Because Dickens and Malone worked together to chronicle her story, Working Girl Blues is more of an informed exploration of her life than might have occurred in a typical autobiography. For example, Malone not only explains how Dickens rejected the fatalism of her Primitive Baptist upbringing but "revered the democracy of the church," he also shows how it influenced her writing (3-4). The inclusion of "Songs and Memories," and the discography in the same volume round out the picture of the woman who wrote "It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song."

Another strength of Working Girl Blues is that Malone, while celebrating Dickens's activism, does not overly intellectualize her life or work. In describing her voice "as an angry call for justice" Malone does not wrap Dickens in a feminist shroud (1). As he observes, "the seeds of Hazel's women's songs . . . did not germinate in the larger field of American feminism . . . they first flowered in the honky-tonks, a product of the treatment she received from her fellow musicians and club owners"(11).

If there were to be a weakness identified in Working Girl Blues, it would have to be the inability of Malone to write as an objective biographer. While there is a significant body of work about Bluegrass and Appalachian musicians and singers, there is not enough. And it is unlikely that Bill C. Malone will have an opportunity to revisit the life and work of Hazel Dickens as a traditional biographer.

Hazel Dickens sang on the soundtracks to the films Harlan County USA, Matewan, and Songcatcher. By the end of her life, Dickens's voice represented for many people the woman's voice in both traditional Appalachian music and Bluegrass. It is often said of a good singer's voice that once you hear and know it, you will never mistake it for another. That was never more true than of Hazel Dickens's voice. "It [was] not a pathetic wail, nor a dejected cry of despair. It [was] an angry call for justice"(3). Thanks to Working Girl Blues, when future generations discover Dickens's music, they can also learn what shaped and inspired her to be on the front lines of and give voice to twentieth-century Appalachia's most important battles.