Hazel Dickens

Burlington, MA - Renowned folk/bluegrass artist Hazel Dickens will be honored as one of the inaugural inductees into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame, Friday, November 16, at The Cultural Center in Charleston, WV.

Considered one of the most influential and powerful artists, male or female, in the world of Americana music, Dickens will be presented with her award by her longtime admirer, Alison Krauss. As a performer, songwriter, advocate, and mentor, Hazel Dickens has steadfastly refused to be categorized or stereotyped.

Growing up in the shadow of the exploitive and dangerous coal mining industry in West Virginia, Dickens and two of her eleven siblings moved to the Baltimore area in the late 1950s. She quickly fell in with urban musicians such as Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard, who were captivated by the traditional music Dickens had grown up singing and hearing in West Virginia. Performing as Hazel and Alice, Dickens and Gerrard recorded four albums together before parting ways in 1976.

After their partnership dissolved, Dickens released a series of solo albums that presented her uniquely personal amalgam of old-time string band sounds, bluegrass, protest songs, and classic country. She took her experience in the coal mining trade and transformed it into the material she would use for a lasting musical career that has spoken up for the overworked, underpaid, and iron-willed.

Her songs such as “Working Girl Blues,” “Black Lung,” and “Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There,” have provided a voice for the many lives that have found themselves in similar situations. Her music was featured in the Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, U.S.A., which depicted the tensions surrounding a coal miners’ strike in rural Kentucky. Her poignant songs, such as “Mama’s Hand,” “A Few Old Memories,” “West Virginia, My Home,”and “You’ll Get No More of Me,” (available on Rounder Records) have been widely recorded by other artists. In 2001, Dickens was awarded a Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, the highest official honor bestowed on traditional musicians by the U.S. Government.

For more information and a complete list of inductees visit the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame online.

From Rounder