”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