Working Girl Blues (4 page)

The retreat to the solitude of her apartment did not in any sense signal a disengagement from the world, nor did her divorce sour her relationship
with men. The breakup with Joe and, more important, the tragic marital unhappiness experienced by some of her sisters made her wary of another marriage. But she has enjoyed significant friendships with men such as Mike Seeger, Ralph Rinzler, Dudley Connell, and Tracy Schwarz, and she has had a long and intimate companionship with Ken Irwin, one of the cofounders of Rounder Records. Professionally, she sang frequently with Alice as a duo (under the name Hazel and Alice) and found that an almost cultlike following was developing around their music. Their passionate, spine-tingling harmonies and interesting repertory of songs attracted tradition-minded bluegrass fans. The ultimate mark of acceptance came when bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe expressed his appreciation for their music and gave them one of his songs, “The One I Love Is Gone.” Ron Thomason, mandolin player and leader of the Dry Branch Fire Squad, speaks for many people when he declares that Hazel and Alice brought back “the chill, the feeling of excitement and the power” that he had felt years earlier when he first discovered bluegrass music.
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Many women, both within and outside the bluegrass genre, became emboldened to pursue careers in music by hearing or observing the performances of the duo.

After 1967, Hazel and Alice became part of the Strange Creek Singers, a larger organization led by Mike Seeger. Mike and Alice had married and were living in Pennsylvania (Jeremy Foster had died in an automobile accident in 1964). Composed of Seeger, Alice, Hazel, Lamar Grier, and Tracy Schwarz, the Strange Creek Singers borrowed its name from a stream in Braxton County, West Virginia, but was headquartered in Pennsylvania. The group performed irregularly, but gave occasional performances in clubs and festivals; they did make one tour on the West Coast in 1974 and one in Europe in 1975 where they visited Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Northern Ireland, and Sweden. Performing with the Strange Creek Singers at such venues as the Brandywine Folk Festival in Delaware gave Hazel exposure before an audience that was substantially different from the blue-grass crowd. These were the “folkniks”—those who valued what they
thought
was traditional music. At Brandywine and similar gatherings, Hazel sometimes reached far back in her cultural memory to perform a traditional English ballad such as “Little Margaret.” The reception of such performances supported a fact that was becoming crucial in Hazel's evolving career: her appeal to an audience that was made up of varying constituencies.
The Strange Creek Singers made only one album. Recorded in 1969 and 1970 and released on the Arhoolie label in 1972, it included the earliest recorded version of Hazel's a cappella performance of her grim expression of social protest, “Black Lung.”
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A major milestone in Hazel's emerging politicization and growing social consciousness was her involvement with the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project, which was created in 1966 as an arm of the civil rights movement by Bernice Johnson Reagon, now professor emeritus at American University and founder of the gospel singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Anne Romaine. Reagon and Romaine conceived of the Revival Project as a force that would combine the musical talents of white and black Southerners who would perform before integrated audiences in the South. Until her death on October 26, 1995 (from a ruptured appendix), Anne Romaine was a close friend and mentor of Hazel. Born Dorothy Anne Cooke on November 1, 1942, in Atlanta, Georgia, Romaine grew up in a family imbued with a Presbyterian mission heritage. She became passionately engaged in civil rights during her attendance at the University of Virginia and after she married the radical activist Howard Romaine. Hazel and Alice joined the project in 1967, becoming part of a revolving cast of black and white musicians (such as Dock Boggs, Roscoe Holcomb, Dewey Balfa, Johnny Shines, Mike Seeger, and others) who made two tours per year, one in the Deep South and one in the Upper South. This experience was liberating for Hazel because it permitted her to sing songs that expressed her social concern. Performing alongside and in front of working-class people like herself, Hazel once again became attached to her southern roots. “For a while I was going through this thing where I was rebelling against anything that had to do with the South, and with myself too, and my family and things that my family had gone through.” Involvement with the project transformed these feelings of inadequacy into a source of strength. In remarks made to Bruce Shapiro in 1982, Hazel declared that “the tour gave me the support I needed not to be ashamed of being from a poor family.”
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Although her inhibitions about singing overtly political material lessened considerably during these tours,
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Hazel had already received legitimization as a spokesperson for working people's rights through her appearances at coal-mining songs symposia at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Her appearances there were at the invitation of Ralph Rinzler, the director of the
festival and a dedicated champion of traditional music who earlier had presented Doc Watson and Bill Monroe to northern folk revival audiences. Rinzler and Hazel had become fast friends after their mutual friend, Mike Seeger, introduced them at a Bill Monroe concert at New River Ranch. Rinzler was deeply impressed with Hazel because she combined the style and sensibility of a mountain singer with a passion for social justice. She was, in short, a modern-day equivalent of Sarah Ogan Gunning and Aunt Molly Jackson. Hazel, for her part, had originally been drawn to Rinzler because of their mutual enthusiasm for the music of Bill Monroe, but she soon discovered that they also shared a similar commitment to human rights. She has since said of their relationship, “We were pretty much on the same page when it came to politics and social justice, and of course music was the glue that kept it all together.”

Hazel wrote “Black Lung” late in 1969, and introduced it that year at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. It was the item that did most to put her in contact with people who were committed to social justice and working people's rights. She sang the song on November 21, 1970, at Horse Creek in Clay County, Kentucky, during a meeting sponsored by a grassroots organization called Mountain People's Rights that called attention to the failure of coal companies in Clay and other eastern Kentucky counties to pay the benefits of black lung victims. Her song came from deep personal experience: the trauma of witnessing her brother Thurman die of the affliction, with no funds to pay his medical expenses. As she painfully recollects, “I think watching him die this horrible death really took a toll on me and the way I thought. He was born, lived, and died poor, and didn't even have enough to bury himself.” The Horse Creek meeting, and Hazel's performance, received
New York Times
coverage and won featured exposure on CBS-TV during Walter Cronkite's
Evening News.

As a consequence of the publicity garnered by the Horse Creek meeting, Hazel began to receive many requests to sing her songs at union meetings and other related political events. She also became inspired to write other political ballads. “Clay County Miner,” in fact, was written as soon as she got home from the Horse Creek meeting. “I'd never seen that many disabled and poor people at one time in one place. I didn't think I'd ever see some of them again.” Soon thereafter, at a United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) meeting in Huntington, West Virginia, she received further validation
of her dawning mission to sing the songs of struggling working-class folk: “I remember seeing people from my background that talked like me. They were out there in the workforce challenging the people that employed them. I remember the feeling that came over me when they got up to the microphone to talk.”

In 1972, singer-activist Guy Carawan invited Hazel to participate in a series of Appalachian music workshops, concentrating on coal mining, at Highlander Folk Center in New Market, Tennessee. The experience brought her into intimate contact with other people who were active battlers for working-class justice, and resulted in an LP called
Come All You Coal Miners
(Rounder 4005). Hazel recorded four of her own songs, “Black Lung,” “Cold-Blooded Murder,” “Clay County Miner,” and “Mannington Mine Disaster.” Hazel met and sang with such legendary balladeers as Sarah Ogan Gunning and Florence Reece, the writer of the great labor anthem, “Which Side Are You On?” The association with Sarah Gunning may have contributed to Hazel's emotional loosening up, because Sarah talked a “blue streak” and readily gave vent to her opinions. Reece, on the other hand, is fondly remembered as “this little old white-haired lady, who looked like she might have just walked out of her kitchen.” The young people who stood around her, basking in her every word, reminded Hazel of little birds yearning to be fed.

Hazel's growing prominence as a social activist and singer of protest songs inspired the affiliation of Hazel and Alice with the Rounder record company. The Rounder label was only about a year old in 1971, with a mere handful of records in its catalog, when Ken Irwin heard Hazel perform at a coal-mining song workshop at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. A trio of young radicals afire with the passion for social justice (Irwin, Bill Nowlin, and Marian Leighton), known as the Rounder Collective, had organized the label. Irwin had never heard the music of Hazel and Alice, but he was swept away by what he heard at the workshop—Hazel's blend of working-class authenticity and social consciousness. His reaction is reminiscent of that felt in the 1930s by young radicals like Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger when they first encountered Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Irwin recalls that “we were right out of the 60s, very political and concerned about injustice.” When he approached Hazel about the possibility of making a record, she told him that she didn't make records without the support of “this other
woman I sing with” (i.e., Alice). So Irwin and the other Rounder folks went to a Labor Day festival in Delaware and met with both Hazel and Alice. Hazel was no stranger to “northern hippies” because she had worked and communed with them since her days in Baltimore, but she admits that she was initially bemused by this little band of enthusiasts who had become fascinated by southern roots music, and even had a touch of misgiving when she saw them peddling their records from the back of a Volkswagen bus.

Hazel and Alice's first recording session for Rounder came in 1972, and the resulting album,
Hazel and Alice,
was released in 1973. Its issuance inspired Folkways to release their second Hazel and Alice album. Rounder had limited funds but, unlike Folkways, it tried to market its material as broadly as possible. More than any other release, this first Rounder recording contributed to the mystique surrounding the women. It also won for them still another audience—feminists. Although bluegrass traditionalists and old-time music fans were very pleased with the sound and content of the album, women tended to be most passionate in their response. It was highly gratifying, and inspiring, to find an album that featured two women presenting material that they themselves had produced, and it was intriguing to hear Hazel singing in a high tenor style that previously had been the province of men like Ira Louvin and Bill Monroe. Although Hazel and Alice inspired such musicians as Lynn Morris, Rhonda Vincent, Laurie Lewis, Carol Elizabeth Jones, and Dale Ann Bradley to try their hands in the blue-grass business, their influence was not confined to that genre. Emmylou Harris, for example, borrowed directly from the duo's repertoire, and Naomi Judd became convinced from hearing the album that a musical career would be feasible for her and her daughter Christina. Sometime in 1975, Naomi paid a dollar for a used copy of the first Rounder record in a store in Berea, Kentucky, and when she and her daughter listened to it, they were impressed by Hazel and Alice's spunky independence and by their singing of such songs as “The Sweetest Gift, a Mother's Smile.” Recalling the incident, Naomi said, “What a concept, a record with two women singing together! We became absolutely transfixed. It was the sound of the Kentucky hills where I grew up.”
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In the 1980s, Naomi and Christina (now renamed Wynonna) built a prominent career in mainstream country music as the Judds.

Hazel and Alice soon discovered that their songs had done more than move women to attempt musical careers; the songs were also becoming part of the soundtrack of the feminist movement. At least four songs on the first Rounder album defended the rights of women and made spirited assertions of feminine independence: Alice's “Custom-Made Woman Blues” and three songs written by Hazel, “Pretty Bird” (performed by Hazel alone in an a cappella style), “My Better Years” (inspired by the rupture of her marriage in 1969 and her rejection of her husband's efforts to reconcile), and “Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There.” In 1974, Hazel and Alice gave a concert for the Folksong Society of Greater Boston, and found that the nature of their audiences had changed significantly. The society's traditional membership believed in practicing proper decorum when a concert was given, but they were accustomed to singing along with the performers. Mike Seeger, for example, had been severely unnerved during an earlier concert when the crowd sang along with him on his first five numbers. He finally had to resort to a Jew's harp solo to get them to stop singing. On the night of their Boston appearance, Hazel and Alice found the small auditorium packed, with some people standing and others sitting cross-legged on the floor. The regular members of the society were highly disconcerted and distraught at the new people who had invaded their domain and who were so enthusiastic about Hazel and Alice that they cheered and hooted in an unbecoming manner. “Who are these people?” they wondered. The newcomers, of course, were feminists who had been won over by Hazel and Alice's music and who looked upon them as heroes. Hazel and Alice had gained a new audience without consciously seeking to do so. They had never identified with the feminist movement, and in fact claimed to know little about it. They were pleased with this new support, but were sometimes disconcerted by the anti-male feelings that were expressed. On at least one occasion, in New York, they arrived to give a concert and found that men had been excluded.