_I first heard Hazel Dickens’s voice in 1986. I had been cast in the John Sayles-directed motion picture Matewan, and the production had sent me cassettes of songs and speech by figures from the Appalachian spheres of labor and culture. Nimrod Workman’s voice was there on the tapes, as were the voices of Aunt Molly Jackson and Hazel Dickens.

They were all effectively one voice to me at first; I was listening for regional accent study (at which I failed fairly spectacularly) as well as ideological content (I did better here). The Matewan production had begun to indoctrinate me. The lessons were strong and laid a foundation for lifelong learning. Just as people obsessed with their (our) spiritual well-being ultimately determine (“It’s the journey, dude, not the destination”), the lives lived during the creation or production of a system or thing are as crucial as—or more crucial than—the desired end goal. It is the journey, dummy, and the journey is personified by the worker, and the value of any endeavor is exemplified by the treatment of the workers involved in bringing the endeavor to life. As the Hazel Dickens tune says, “It’s hard to tell the singer from the song.” This is because the song ought to be made from the life of the singer (and the writer).

I heard Dickens’s voice, then, prior to witnessing her singing on set. There’s an outdoor funeral scene in Matewan during which a miner and a union organizer discuss taking potentially violent action against the coal companies. The actors are Ken Jenkins and Chris Cooper, and I knew both of them from their work on the stage in Louisville, Kentucky. They were, in effect, heroes of mine.

When their dialogue in the scene concludes, Hazel Dickens begins to sing, “Deliver us from the gathering storm.” Nobody had prepared me for what I was to witness. Watching the scene now, I can see the seeds of the shifting of my life’s focus from acting to singing. Jenkins’s and Cooper’s characters discuss action, and then Dickens’s character takes action by raising her voice in song. This is what I sought from life: communication of emotion and information directly from my being into the brains and souls of our fellow humans. I had thought that acting was the way, but I began to learn that singing, instead, was more direct, more powerful, more useful. Singing is more primeval and thorough in its use of human capacity to deliver and receive.

_The film Matewan brought me to Appalshop. After its New York City premiere, there was an Appalachian premiere at Appalshop. Six years later the first record in which I had involvement was released—the Palace Brothers’ “Ohio River Boat Song” and “Drinking Woman”—on a 7-inch single produced by Drag City Records. I brought the record to Appalshop to play it on their spectacular radio station, WMMT. I’ve visited many times since then, appearing on WMMT, performing at their Seedtime on the Cumberland cultural festival, performing in their theater, or just visiting to access the archives or commune with the people who work there.

This little bit of footage of Hazel singing her song “Black Lung” at Seedtime on the Cumberland—salvaged after the 2022 eastern Kentucky flood and featured in Mimi Pickering’s documentary Hazel Dickens: It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song—is exemplary of her power as a songwriter and as a singer. She’s simply undeniable as she puts stories from her own life into lyrical form and almost excruciatingly lifts her voice into beautiful melodic expression of her own life and the lives she’s observed and been touched by.

_Kentucky and West Virginia, prior to the ravages rendered first by the coal industry and more recently by the pharmaceutical industry, were culturally vital in ways that are only really echoed currently. That the echoes are evocative, powerful, even transformative is evidence of this body of song and story, and of its connective influence. Appalshop’s unique position and accumulated resources make the worth of its archives inestimably high. Time is a human construct, and the deconstruction of this force through attention to what we call “history” is our responsibility, seeking out the artifacts of our recent actions, crimes, and accomplishments to make sense of what we’ve labeled our “present” and our “future.” I would argue for continued exploitation and celebration of the materials harbored in Appalshop’s archives, to use these materials for the exploration and expansion of the identities of the people of the region. The rebuilding of cultural awareness, including its reparable flaws, should be priority in southeastern Kentucky, in western Virginia, and in West Virginia.

In 2006, my friend Nathan Salsburg organized a series of concerts in New York City to help commemorate the centennial anniversary of the folklorist Alan Lomax. He invited me (and I in turn invited my brothers, as our father had just died very unexpectedly) to open these shows. Hazel Dickens headlined. I was given Hazel’s phone number, and I can still vividly remember pacing the floor at my parents’ house in Louisville as Hazel and I spoke at length about music.

Hazel Dickens was one of the foundational artists of the great Hardly Strictly Bluegrass music festival, held annually (free of charge to the public) in San Francisco, and she was a star there. Here in Louisville, on our amazing community radio station, WXOX, there’s a show, “Hundred Proof Fountain,” that plays her music regularly, as I know her music is played around the country by listeners hungry for and appreciative of songs of substance sung by voices of relentless compassion such as Hazel’s.

In this clip of Hazel speaking and singing, we get a peek into her artistic process. Such a glimpse is a rare treasure for those of us who spend our lives inside the labor of song creation and performance. I know from my own experience that Appalshop’s archives are rife with unique and indispensable recordings, visual and audio, that will inform and remind us all of who we can be, innately, and how we can confront the sometimes strangling challenges heaped on us by empire and thoughtlessness.

I make my living writing songs and singing them. I am not a prose writer (obviously), but I thank you for reading these words and I hope that I have offered some instigation for supporting and exploring the work of Hazel Dickens, the value of the Appalshop archives, and the vast resource that is Appalachian culture.

Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a four-part series spotlighting flood-salvaged artifacts from the Appalshop Archive, which houses the largest media collection of Appalachian history and culture in the world.