This is what Guy looked like when I first met him in Yellow Springs, lugging his guitar and a slide carousel.
Guy Carawan has died. I met
Guy at Antioch in 1958. He was passing through and had recently returned from a
trip to China. I was Activities Director (a student government position) and
had a budget and was able to pay him an honorarium and set up a screening of
his slides from Mao’s China in the old gym. it was packed. China was a mystery
in those days. It was before Lucy Jarvis took NBC there. Even before Felix
Greene had made his film or published his books. A slide show from this
forbidden territory caused a big stir in middle Ohio. People came from Dayton
and even Cincinnati. It was one of my biggest “activities”. Guy liked
listening to my partner Mahlon’s banjo and took to it like a fish to water. It
replaced his guitar as his signature instrument. Guy and me and Alice Foster
(Gerrard) and I think it was Joan Goodman crammed into a tiny VW bug and headed
south to Highlander one weekend from Yellow springs. Highlander was a civil
rights training center where Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, CT Vivian and many
other leaders met and held strategy workshops. I had been there many times
while in high school in Chattanooga and wanted to share the experience with my
Antioch friends. Guy had been there in 1953 and was anxious to see it again. We
had a great time. It wasn’t a workshop weekend, so we spent time listening to
Myles Horton telling us mountain stories and helping the cook Dodie shell peas
to freeze. And of course Dodie and Guy traded songs. Later that very month
Highlander was raided and shut down for “selling liquor without a license”
because of the donation can near the six packs in the frig. Grundy Country was
dry, even though The University of the South down the road was the drinkingest
college in the country. The informer apparently was that same Dodie, the cook. As
years passed, I saw Guy several times in New York whenever he came for a
concert and once I helped him edit a video of a Highlander music workshop, Come
All You Coal Miners, which had been shot on reel to reel tape. We edited at EAI
at their place on 5th ave. I last saw Guy and Candie, his wife, at the New
Market Highlander when I was there for a media activism workshop. Guy leaves
many recorded songs, several books (my favorite is “Ain’t you gotta Right to
the Tree of Life?”about the Georgia Sea Islands) and a lovely tape by his
daughter Heather, The Telling Takes Me Home.
Guy Carawan has died. I met Guy at Antioch in 1958. He was passing through and had recently returned from a trip to China. I was Activities Director (a student government position) and had a budget and was able to pay him an honorarium and set up a screening of his slides from Mao’s China in the old gym. it was packed. China was a mystery in those days. It was before Lucy Jarvis took NBC there. Even before Felix Greene had made his film or published his books. A slide show from this forbidden territory caused a big stir in middle Ohio. People came from Dayton and even Cincinnati. It was one of my biggest “activities”.
Guy liked listening to my partner Mahlon’s banjo and took to it like a fish to water. It replaced his guitar as his signature instrument. Guy and me and Alice Foster (Gerrard) and I think it was Joan Goodman crammed into a tiny VW bug and headed south to Highlander one weekend from Yellow springs.
Highlander was a civil rights training center where Rosa Parks, Septima Clark, CT Vivian and many other leaders met and held strategy workshops. I had been there many times while in high school in Chattanooga and wanted to share the experience with my Antioch friends. Guy had been there in 1953 and was anxious to see it again. We had a great time. It wasn’t a workshop weekend, so we spent time listening to Myles Horton telling us mountain stories and helping the cook Dodie shell peas to freeze. And of course Dodie and Guy traded songs. Later that very month Highlander was raided and shut down for “selling liquor without a license” because of the donation can near the six packs in the frig. Grundy Country was dry, even though The University of the South down the road was the drinkingest college in the country. The informer apparently was that same Dodie, the cook.
As years passed, I saw Guy several times in New York whenever he came for a concert and once I helped him edit a video of a Highlander music workshop, Come All You Coal Miners, which had been shot on reel to reel tape. We edited at EAI at their place on 5th ave. I last saw Guy and Candie, his wife, at the New Market Highlander when I was there for a media activism workshop. Guy leaves many recorded songs, several books (my favorite is “Ain’t You Gotta Right to the Tree of Life?”about the Georgia Sea Islands) and a lovely tape by his daughter Heather, The Telling Takes Me Home.
When I was a student at Antioch in 1958 I used to hang out at a ramshackle clapboard house that was practically on campus and the source of consternation for the college administration and the Yellow Springs "civic improvement association". A non-functioning Bendix washer made the yard closer to Appalachia than Central Ohio suburbia and the sounds of guitar picking were pretty much always heard through the pushed-out-screen door. It was where Jeremy Foster and Alice Gerrard Foster lived with their red-haired toddler Coralee. I was the eldest of four girls and had recently left my Tennessee family and my own younger red haired sisters and being at the Fosters was the closest thing to home for me.
One afternoon the Fosters were especially excited-- "Stick around," Jeremy said--a friend was coming by-- her name was Hazel and she was from West Virginia. Jeremy and Alice weren't from the mountains-- Jeremy was from outside DC and Alice was a California Valley girl. But they loved country music. REAL authentic country music, not, as Jeremy used to put it, "Fuck music" of the sort that co-eds from Greenwich Village moaned in their Antioch dorm rooms.
As Alice and Jeremy bustled about changing sheets on the pull-out couch, it was clear that they thought Hazel was the real thing. I imagined a Dorothea Lange sort of hillbilly, earthy type, maybe dressed in a flour sack shift, perhaps driving a rattletrap Ford pick-up. I couldn't wait! After several hours of anxious expectation, a car did pull in to the Foster's drive way, not a hillbilly truck, but the biggest, fanciest limo I had ever seen. Out stepped a woman with a bee-hive hair-do, heavy make-up and a shiny red dress with a big slit up the thigh. Hazel wasn't coming directly from the mountains of West Virginia, but from Baltimore where she was working the bars.
Jeremy and Alice were overjoyed to see her and laughed at my surprise. Within a few minutes of driving up, she took out a guitar and she and Alice picked and sang a Carter Family song together. I think it was "Chawing, chewing gum..." Yes, Hazel was authentic. She was the best singer I had ever heard and I sat with Coralee on my lap for the rest of the afternoon listening to an amazing song swap.
Jeremy died a few years later in an accident on a DC beltway. Alice and Hazel ended up forming a team and recording several LPs with many original songs. Coralee is now a physician in Ithaca, I think, and Alice is living in the mountains of North Carolina. And Hazel died today.
Hazel Dickens, 1935 -2011 An Obituary by John Pietaro http://theculturalworker.blogspot.com/2011/04/obituary-of-hazel-dickens.html The high lonesome sound that touched so many, so deeply, could only have been born of both strife and fight-back in equal proportions. Singer/guitarist Hazel Dickens' sound was probably about as high and lonesome as one got. The soundtrack of "Harlan County USA" introduced her to the many outside of the country home she remained a visceral part of, even long after she'd physically moved on. Dickens didn't just sing the anthems of labor, she lived them and her place on many a picket line, staring down gunfire and goon squads, embedded her into the cause. She was born on June 1, 1935 in Montcalm, West Virginia, one of the faceless towns dotting Appalachian coal country. Her father was an amateur banjo player who worked as a truck driver for the mines and ran a Primitive Baptist church each Sunday. Here was where Hazel first began singing, unaccompanied out of necessity and the laws of tradition. But the devotional songs melded with the mountain tunes and ballads, creating a unique personal style. Bearing a rough, at times coarse timber, her voice eagerly reflected the broken topography about her as well as the pains of poverty in her midst. In a family of thirteen residing in a three-room shack, the music was far from distant symbolism for her. At age 16 Dickens relocated to Baltimore where she encountered Mike Seeger on the still fledgling folk scene. Seeger, working alongside his parents Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger in the Library of Congress Archive of American Folksong, began performing with the Dickens family trio, but it was Hazel's association with Seeger's wife Alice Gerrard that offered notable area for impact on the music. The duet of Hazel & Alice recorded original compositions and deeply explored the feminist archetypes in Appalachian song. Dickens was sure to not only raise issues such as the need for equal pay for women workers, but to actively fight for these on and off stage. Among the titles she penned were "Working Girl Blues" and "Don't Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There". She also composed the noted "Black Lung", which called on the miners' plight back home. Like Aunt Mollie Jackson before her, Dickens was able to capture the struggle of the moment in song, and this was most evident in her on-screen performances in celebrated films such as "Matewan" and "Song Catcher" and her work on the above noted "Harlan County USA". The union cause was her cause and it lived anew each time she conjured a topical song set to a melody that sounded as old as the ages. A clear heir to the Appalachian stylings of Aunt Mollie Jackson and Sarah Ogan, Dickens became a respected figure and was a featured singer at folk festivals for decades. Since the 1970s, Dickens had performed with a wide array of musicians including Emmy Lou Harris, Elvis Costello, Linda Ronstadt, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Rosanne Cash. In 2007 she was inducted into the West Virginia Music Hall of Fame. Dickens was active as recent as last month when she was seen attending the South By Southwest Festival in Austin. Hazel Dickens died of complications of pneumonia in Washington DC on April 22. In the blackened crawlspaces of West Virginia's mines the lament was a deafening silence as the mountain peaks seemed to bow in solemn reverence. -John Pietaro is a musician, writer and labor organizer from New York City--http:TheCulturalWorker.blogspot.com
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