The Original Hazel

My friend Angel Dean put this photo up on my MySpace the other day, and I was thrilled to see it. There I am, 20 or so years ago, sitting next to the amazing Hazel Dickens.

Back then Angel, my brother Michael, friend Garth and I had a band called Last Roundup. We were living in the still-cheap, still-bohemian, drug and rat-infested East Village of New York City. And we played country music. Stuff we wrote ourselves after listening to old honky tonk LP's we'd find in thrift shops and cassettes we'd swap of the Carter Family and the Louvin Brothers. My brother and Garth and I had been hugely into punk, which by this point had gotten watered down into new wave. But punk had given us the confidence to do something we had no qualifications for and to make it work out of sheer enthusiasm.  Angel was a gifted singer from East Tennessee who'd been performing with her ukelele in bars around town. The four of us played constantly in the city from about 1983 through 1987, getting to the clubs by loading guitars, washboards, banjo, fiddle, lapsteel, amp, cowbell, upright bass (and ukelele) into unsuspecting Checker cabs.

You know those moments in life where you read a book or see a film or hear a voice that changes the way you look at things? Hearing Hazel Dickens for the first time did that for me. Her recordings, with Alice Gerrard and then solo, were so honest, so close to reality they brought me to tears. Here was a woman conveying hard truth and beauty in the same notes. If I'd never known anything more about her she would've still had that effect on me. But when I learned how she'd grown up in a coal mining family, worked day jobs for most of the time she was writing and singing about working people - well, she was someone to look up to in many ways.

After a failed attempt to make a record in Nashville, and a lot more gigs in New York, New Jersey, Boston and beyond, Last Roundup had been signed by folk and roots label Rounder. We were working on our first (and only) album in a studio in Springfield, MO when Ken Irwin, one of the label founders, showed up with Hazel, who was also on the label. I was very nervous to meet her but she was as real and engaging as her singing. Fun and natural in that West Virginia way.

When Will, my husband at the time, and I were expecting a baby we were going around and around about names. One day we were watching Barbara Koppel's brilliant documentary "Harlan County USA" about coal miners striking in Kentucky. There's a scene where a voice cuts through with such intensity - of course it was Hazel Dickens, who wrote and performed several songs for the film. We looked at each other and knew, if we had a girl, what her name was going to be.

I'm happy Angel put this photo out there, because it's made me think again of that time in my life and this incredible woman. I haven't seen her since the early 90's but every now and then will read something about her and remember to listen to her music again. She has kept on, appearing in the film "Songcatcher” and receiving an NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 2001. She's the subject of a documentary called "It's Hard To Tell The Singer From the Song," available from Appalshop.

Hazel Dickens doesn't have a MySpace - I think I'm going to write her a letter.