”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

Review of Dust-to-Digital's Blind Alfred Reed: Appalachian Visionary

In 2006, during his Seeger Session Tour, Bruce Springsteen added an old song from the early days of the recording industry to his live sets. He kept only one original verse, adding his own to comment on the devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and to critique President Bush (or “president bystander” as he calls him at one show) for his subsequent inaction. In 2013, British reggae band UB40 released a regrettable version of the same song on their new album, also taking lyrical liberties, in this instance to reflect concerns over the global financial crisis. That song, “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” was composed in the Jazz Age by Southern West Virginia farmer and musician Blind Alfred Reed (1880–1956). It’s impossible to know how Reed—a deeply religious, lifelong Republican whose songs were heavily critical of capitalism—would feel about these subsequent versions, but he would undoubtedly be surprised by the song’s longevity. He recorded “How Can a Poor Man?” in New York on December 4, 1929, one week after the stock market crash. He would never record again.

Read on in the Journal of American Folklore

Review of Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics by Jean R. Freedman

The first time ever I was struck by Peggy Seeger’s music was when I saw a video of her performing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” the song her husband Ewan MacColl wrote for her in 1957. In the video, Peggy is probably in her late 40s, wearing a pink t-shirt and jeans, her hair cut short in a curly pixie cut. She’s seated alone on a stage, picking arpeggios on a small parlor guitar. Her voice, like her presentation, is unadorned aside from her natural vibratro, ringing out with incredible clarity out into the dark auditorium. It’s stunning. While that performance is what initially piqued my interest in Seeger, Jean R. Freedman’s new biography, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics, is what indulged and sustained my curiosity. The book, of interest to folk song scholars and fans of Seeger alike, offers an intimate and considered portrait, fully contextualized by Freedman’s background as an academic folklorist and informed by her thirty-year friendship with the folk singer, activist, and member of the legendary Seeger family.

Read on in the Journal of the Society for American Music

Honey from the Lion: A Companion Soundscape

“As the holidays approach, so does the time to curl up with beautiful and necessary books like Honey from the Lion, Matthew Neil Null’s debut novel from Lookout Books. The book, about a rebellion at a logging company in the West Virginia Alleghenies, is both lyrical and suspenseful, an elegy to the ecological devastation and human tragedy behind the Gilded Age.

Our solstice gift to you is an annotated soundscape for the book, expertly produced by folklorist, writer, media producer, and Ecotone contributor Emily Hilliard. Listen to the sounds of crows, trains, and fiddles and imagine yourself right into the world of Honey from the Lion.”

Read on and listen via Ecotone

Foreword to the New Edition of Folk Songs from the West Virginia Hills →

"Folk Songs from the West Virginia Hills and other folkloric documentation can serve as a mirror to show us the culture we have, but also what we’ve lost and gained along the way, for better or for worse. Throughout the collection, Gainer provides evidence of how folk songs are distilled democratic cultural nuggets of a community, conveying the values of its people. He declares, 'They are called folk songs because they belong to the people and not any one individual.' Folklorist Lynne McNeill says this another way: 'Group consensus shapes folklore, so folklore is a great measure of group consensus.' I, for one, am proud to live and work in a place where the group consensus is for singing."

Read on via West Virginia University Press