15 Facts About Hazel Dickens

Hazel Dickens's music was characterized not only by her high, lonesome singing style, but by her provocative pro-union, feminist songs.

Hazel Dickens was posthumously inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame alongside Gerrard in 2017.

Hazel Dickens was born in Montcalm, West Virginia, on June 1,1925, the eighth of eleven siblings in a mining family of 6 boys and 5 girls.

Many of Hazel Dickens's relatives were miners, including her brothers, cousins, and, eventually, her brothers-in-law.

Hazel Dickens's father worked as a minister at a Primitive Baptist church and played the banjo.

Hazel Dickens met Mike Seeger, younger half-brother of Pete Seeger and founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers, through her brother Robert, who had met him at a TB hospital where Seeger was working at the time.

Hazel Dickens used her music to try and make a difference in the lives of non-unionized mine workers and feminists.

Hazel Dickens started to write more about the lives of miners and wrote a song titled "Black Lung" about her brother, Thurman, who died from the disease.

Hazel Dickens wrote a song titled "Coal Mining Women" about the hardships women faced in the coal mining world.

In 1978, Hazel Dickens performed at the Vandalia Gathering in Charleston, West Virginia, both solo and then with the former coal-miner turned musician, Carl Rutherford.

Hazel Dickens began to be seen as an activist and a voice for the working people.

Hazel Dickens appeared in the Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, USA, which centers on the struggle of the county's miners union against scab workers, wage rights, and health conditions; she contributed four songs to the film's soundtrack.

In 2011, Hazel Dickens died in a Washington, DC hospice from complications of pneumonia.

Hazel Dickens was buried in Princeton, West Virginia at Roselawn Memorial Gardens.

Hazel Dickens received the Merit Award from the International Bluegrass Music Association in 1994 and was the first woman to do so.