”Making a living by the sweat of her brow”: Hazel dickens and a life of work

Informed by archival interviews, writings, correspondence, and performances by Hazel Dickens, and inspired by Jessica Wilkerson’s 2019 NPR article “A Lifetime Of Labor: Maybelle Carter At Work,” West Virginia state folklorist Emily Hilliard considers musician Hazel Dickens’s experiences as a woman engaged in a lifetime of both wage work and care work. This lived experience, as well as Hazel’s approach to music as work, was the foundation which directly informed her identity formation, inspired her songwriting, and fueled her advocacy for working people across the globe.

Read on via Smithsonian Folklife

“Written and Composed by Nora E. Carpenter” Song Lyric Scrapbooks, Home Recordings, and Self-Documentation →

Essay in Southern Cultures' Documentary Arts Issue, Spring 2016

Read on in Southern Cultures

The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman: ‘I’m Not Sure Why Music Is Still Overwhelmed By Dudes’

Canadian songwriter Tamara Lindeman’s songs each offer a vivid yet fleeting mise en scène. Her specific, detailed visuals are not opaque, but rather offer a portal for the exploration of enigmatic emotional relationships: parabolas and possibilities and perspectives. They show, don’t tell.

Lindeman, who performs under the name The Weather Station, first found her creative footing as an actor. After playing in a number of bands in Toronto, she released her first solo album All Of It Was Mine in 2011 on Canadian label You’ve Changed Records, followed by What Am I Going To Do With Everything I Know in 2014.

Read on via Bandwidth

Heavenly Work: The Fleeting Legacy of the Shakers →

Ten years have passed since my first visit to Canterbury Shaker Village, but walking again past the apple trees and old wooden buildings, I’m struck by the same feeling. In this small settlement nestled among New Hampshire’s green, rolling hills, a serenity seeps into my bones and muscles, compelling me to walk slowly, deliberately, with reverence. The Shakers believed they were creating and living in a heaven on earth, and that belief feels tangible here, a surviving legacy. But the sentiment also implies a tension—between permanence and transience, between mortal and eternal existence—that is itself ephemeral, difficult to grasp.

Read on in Ecotone

"All the Women Go Home Appreciating Where Their Food Comes From": A Response to Modern Farmer's "Chicken-Slaughtering Pinup Girls"

When the Modern Farmer article “Painting the Farm Red: The Chicken-Slaughtering Pinup Girls of Marion Acres” appeared in my inbox, I took once glance, deemed it inconsequential, and deleted it. Then it started popping up all over my Facebook feed, and the images of twenty– and thirty-something women in bandanas and red lipstick leering at chickens stuffed into slaughtering cones was too difficult to ignore, so I clicked. When my friend Lora asked me for my feminist analysis, I balked, “I have no real feminist analysis. I just think this is profoundly dumb.”

Despite my initial reaction, the complex implications of that story (if you can call it that) have stuck with me and left me wondering what the piece might say about the societal fetishization of women and meat, agrarian labor, and rural culture. Turns out, I have a feminist analysis after all.

Read on in Render

Fresh Out of the Coven: Pentagram Pie →

Pentagrams are an ancient symbol, but lately they’ve been popping up everywhere from forearms to TV shows to um…bikinis. I too seem to have been caught under the pentagram’s spell; I've recently developed an affinity for the encircled, five-pointed star.

The pentagram carries different spiritual meanings depending on the cultures in which it appears (from Mesopotamia to Freemasonry, Christianity to the occult), but in the Tarot, the "pentacles" correspond astrologically with Taurus, along with the other Earth signs Virgo and Capricorn. In general, the symbol is associated with Mother Earth, craft, the accumulation of knowledge, physicality, and tradition. It also represents stability, grounding forces, and feminine power—ever noticed the 5-pointed star on Wonder Woman’s projectile crown? And if those weren’t enough reasons to start brandishing a pentagram medallion, there's also the British folk-rock band Pentangle, one of my favorites, whose name comes from the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Night, and whose album covers sport some of the best pentagram designs I’ve seen.

Read on via The Hairpin

Women at Work: Wrapping up “Give Me Some Sugar” →

For the past 3 months, I’ve been talking with women pastry chefs from across the South for the Southern Foodways Alliance’s series “Give Me Some Sugar.” One of the questions I asked each chef was how being a woman has informed—or hasn’t informed—her work. I asked this, fully understanding that the question has its problems (as described by this Eater piece that was published when I was working on the series), as it marks women as an “other” in the professional culinary world, where women chefs are no longer a rarity.

But I still wanted to ask the question. I knew some might feel indifferent, but also thought that particularly in the world of baking, a realm that at least in the home sphere is still commonly associated with women, that it might elicit some interesting responses. And though a few did laugh at the question, it evoked some powerful stories in others.

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Tandra Watkins →

Who: Tandra Watkins
Where: Ashley’s at the Capital Hotel, 111 West Markham St., Little Rock, AR

When Tandra Watkins described a childhood berry-picking memory, I felt like she was describing one of my own. “I grew up in the country and remember picking blackberries on the side of the dirt road we lived on. We brought them home and turned them into pies, and even had enough leftover to make jam. It was a simple, nice life—I don’t live that way anymore, and I don’t think many people do. But my parents were very involved with food and family.”

Though I grew up in a small city—the dirt road where we picked berries was on a friends’ farm that we visited frequently, this is one of my favorite food memories and serves as a basis for my approach to food, much like it does for Watkins. It’s one centered in whole foods, tradition, and creativity.

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Dolester Miles

Who: Dolester Miles
Where: Highlands Bar and Grill; Bottega, Birmingham, Alabama

One of my favorite themes to explore in my research and writing is the idea of women’s domestic creativity, acknowledging the home as a place of empowerment for creative pursuits. In the days when fewer women held “public work,” the home provided a non-commercial space for practice and experimentation, where women could hone a variety of skills—from cooking to quilting—and share them in a supportive environment. Domestic creativity is alive and well today, too: It could mean making a pie with the ingredients in your pantry, holding a community dinner out of your kitchen to raise money for a cause, or hosting a creative writing group in your living room.

Pastry chef Dolester Miles remembers her mother as a beacon of domestic creativity in their family’s Bessemer, Alabama, home. “She used to make us pecan pies, lemon meringue pies, and peach cobblers, with fresh homemade ice cream and fresh fruit from local farmers,” recalls Miles.

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance

Give Me Some Sugar: Carla Cabrera-Tomasko →

Who: Carla Cabrera-Tomasko
Where: Bacchanalia, 1198 Howell Mill Road, Atlanta, GA

“The Global South” is a popular concept in cultural studies these days. Simply put, it’s a way to compare cultural, political, historical, and socioeconomic trends among the world’s many “Souths”—places like Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and sub-Saharan Africa. Here at home, examining the Global South also means looking at international influences on American Southern culture—as well as the American South’s cultural influence on other parts of the world. In 2010, the Global South was the theme of the Southern Foodways Alliance’s annual symposium, and featured talks on topics ranging from the Cuban influence on Floridian cuisine, to Croatian and Vietnamese shrimpers in Mississippi, to the African origins of rice production in the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia.

Read on via The Southern Foodways Alliance