"You're talking bare bones," Hazel Dickens says in this PBS documentary made a few years ago about her upbringing in rural West Virginia. Dickens did not have a commercial voice, but was a major figure in American music, in an area that would include country, bluegrass, folk and so-called Americana genres. She died today, at 75.
Here, in two pieces, is that profile of her, in which I learned quite a bit. Her description of what it was like for empoverished mining families to be continually indebted to the company store resonates with how the fishing industry here in Newfoundland operated for so many years.
Part two:
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