07 April 2010

LISTEN: Hazel Dickens - Coal Miner's Grave


Hazel Dickens, born in 1935, is a legendary bluegrass singer from Mercer County, West Virginia. She may be best known for her songs featured in the 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA. Dickens' songs are pro-miner, pro-union, pro-West Virginia anthems sung with an unmistakable high lonesome voice. In the wake of Monday's coal mine disaster in Raleigh Country, never more appropriate is Dickens' "Coal Miner's Grave," which was one of her songs featured in Harlan County, USA, an absolutely incredible and important film about the coal miners striker against Duke Power in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1973. (If you haven't seen in, see it. Immediately.)

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