Working Girl Blues: The Life & Music of Hazel Dickens

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“Working Girl Blues” is a biography contained in a discography. Follow a young woman of Appalachia growing up and out of a male-dominated culture to hone her craft in a male-dominated music industry. The songs – “Black Lung” (a song in support of the union movement), remembrances of people who shared her journey, lamentations for what should have been – are delivered with power and feeling in a voice “as strong and chilling as a mountain wind howling across a miner’s grave,” “perhaps the purest embodiment of Hank Williams’ lonesome whippoorwill.”

“Working Girl Blues: The Life & Music of Hazel Dickens,” by Hazel Dickens and Bill C. Malone. Copyright 2008, University of Illinois Press. 102 pages. Cloth, $60; softcover, $17.95. press.uillinois.edu, 217-333-0950.