Cybergrass Bluegrass Music News: Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens

BMNN wrote: on Jan. 21, 2008:
The University of Illinois Press has announced another valuable book, Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens. Working Girl Blues is the life story of singer and songwriter Hazel Dickens, the inspiring voice of a whole generation of women and workers. This latest book is another volume in the University of Illinois Press Music in American Life series. The series has produced other volumes of interest to the bluegrass music community including Neil V. Rosenberg's Bluegrass: A History, Craig Havighurst's Air Castle of the South: WSM and the Making of Music City, Bob Black's Come Hither to Go Yonder: Playing Bluegrass with Bill Monroe, and the recent work, Roni Stoneman as told to Ellen Wright's Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story. Bill C. Malone's introduction traces Dickens's life, musical career, and development as a songwriter, and the book features forty-one illustrations and a detailed discography of her commercial recordings.

"A fascinating portrayal of how one Appalachian native navigated the American shoals. Dickens's voice illuminates the pristine, original, and enduring folk culture of the region and will stimulate readers to ask larger questions about American polity. Folksong buffs, sophisticated feminists, labor partisans, and American and Appalachian studies scholars will be among the enthusiasts for this phenomenal book."
--Archie Green, author of Tin Men

"As a musician, Hazel Dickens has an immediately recognizable voice that perfectly captures the grittiness of the songs she writes. The songs themselves reflect the lives and struggles of the mountain people she grew up with and have acted as a conduit through which the whole country gained a more intimate knowledge of Appalachia. In this effortless, fast-moving narrative, we hear Dickens telling--in her own voice--how she is influenced by her life and times. A thoroughly enjoyable read."
--Ellen Wright, coauthor of Pressing On: The Roni Stoneman Story

Bill C. Malone is a professor emeritus of history at Tulane University. He is the author of several books, including Don't Get above Your Raisin': Country Music and the Southern Working Class.

Title, Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens Cloth, ISBN 978-0-252-03304-9, $60.00
Paper, ISBN 978-0-252-07549-0, $17.95
Pages: 120 pages
Dimensions: 6 x 9 in.
Illustrations: 41 photographs

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