Working Girl Blues (17 page)

“My Love Has Left Me” was written in 1990 from an idea that had come to me after watching a late-night TV show many years earlier. It was a talk show that sometimes had musical guests. On this particular night a number of women guests were talking about how after long years of marriage and children and believing they would grow old together, their husbands left them for younger women. One of the guests was an actress who was married to a famous singer and movie star. They had been married for twenty years and had been so close and compatible throughout their married life that she thought they would spend the rest of their lives together. Then out of the blue he left her and never looked back. She was so shocked. It left her emotionally devastated and unable to cope for a longtime. She had not seen it coming, for he had kept that side of himself a secret. In her shock and grief she sat down and poured it all out on a piece of paper in the form of a poem, saying her lover had left her and no longer he'd come. Meanwhile, all the rest of the world was moving about as usual—bees humming, flowers blooming—and no one had even noticed that she had died, and would not know it for years to come. Every word of her heart-wrenching poem ached with her love and loneliness for him and with her feelings of abandonment. I was so overwrought by just being a witness to the retelling of heartbreak that I couldn't remember but a line or two of the poem. I went out the next day to a bookstore to see if I could find it, but she had not published it. So this song is made up from the feelings of heartbreak and the loneliness of betrayal she communicated to me as she read her poem on that night many years ago.

My love has left me no longer he'll come

And all around the world is so free.

And no one has noticed that I'm fading away

For the flowers are all blooming today

Bridge:

Down in the meadow the bees they still hum

And the little birds are all so full of cheer.

But I have died here in a river of tears,

And no one will notice, for years and years

Our names are still carved on our favorite tree,

And the wildflowers he once picked for me

Are all mingled with brushes o'er the hill where we played

Like my own heart they're withering away.

Bridge:

But the mountain still echoes when I speak his name,

And listens when I shed my lonely tears.

For I have died here in a river of tears,

And no one will notice for years and years.

Playing for a Democratic fund-raising party at Vice President Walter Mondale's home, May 1979.
Left to right:
Akira Otsuka (banjo), Carl Nelson (fiddle), Vice President Mondale, Ralph Rinzler (mandolin), Hazel Dickens (guitar and vocals), Leigh Taylor (bass), John Koparakis (guitar). Used by permission of Walter Mondale.

Poster for a benefit concert for the striking Stearns miners, Lisner Auditorium, Washington, D.C., June 8, 1979.

Left to right:
Nimrod Workman, Molly Workman (Nimrod's wife, partially hidden), Hazel Dickens, Sarah Ogan Gunning, Phyllis Boyens Liptak.

Poster for the Songs of Struggle and Celebration Festival at Northern Illinois University, September 28–30, 1979.

The Johnson Mountain Boys and Hazel Dickens share a marquee in Knoxville, Tennessee, 1985.

Poster for the 1985 Japan tour.

Hazel Dickens had just sung “Freedom's Disciple” for Florence Reece at her eighty-fifth birthday party in 1985. Hazel told her she had composed it for her and for people like her who spend their lives fighting for a better life for working people everywhere. Reece, who wrote the famous labor song “Which Side Are You On?,” liked Hazel's song as well.

John Sayles, writer and producer of the film
Matewan,
with Hazel in the outfit she wore in the church scene just finished, October 1985.

CD cover for It's
Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song,
Rounder 0226, 1987. Courtesy of Rounder Records,
www.rounder.com
.

Hazel Dickens and John Hartford at IBMA in Owensboro, Kentucky, September 1990.