Waving Farewell To A Folk Icon

It was ironic that Easter, a celebration of resurrection, should mark the deaths of two women who were legendary, iconic figures in musical genres they made their own. Of the pair, Poly Styrene, the snarling brace-faced singer who fronted X Ray Spex as they clawed their way to the forefront of the punk movement in the late ’70s, might be best known to readers of Hot Press, while Hazel Dickens is of greater relevance to this column.

Along with her singing partner Alice Gerrard, Hazel Dickens carved out a role for women in bluegrass music which at the time, in the mid-‘60s, was almost exclusively a male reserve. Like Loretta Lynn, she came from mining stock – and with the better known Lynn having been given the sobriquet the ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ Dickens was sometimes referred to as the ‘Coal Miner’s Sister’. She grew up in Mercer County, West Virginia, where she first learned guitar. But it was only after she moved to the Baltimore/Washington area and fell in with the circle of folk musicians centred around Mike Seeger in her mid-to-late twenties, that her talent truly started to shine. Alice Gerrard was Seeger’s wife and had a background in classical music, in contrast to Dickens’ raw bluegrass roots. But there was an electricity in their collaborations; it was Dickens’ searing voice and less-than-perfect guitar picking that stayed with listeners after the final note had rung out.
Although the voice is pure bluegrass – it has been described as “the purest embodiment of Hank Williams’ lonesome whippoorwill” – her themes gelled with the political and socially engaged folk music of the Seegers and their circle, whether it is the proto-feminist salvo of ‘Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped Put Her There’ or one of the miners’ songs such as ‘Black Lung’ or ‘Mannington Mines’ with which she is closely associated.
She lent her voice to a documentary about the striking miners of Harlan County in 1976 while Mimi Pickering’s 2001 documentary It’s Hard to Tell The Singer From The Song, traces her involvement in the protests following the disaster at the Mannington Mines in the Famington area in which 78 miners lost their lives in the mid ’90s. Cut between the interviews with Mining Union representatives and Dickens herself are 16 incredibly passionate performances, including a duet with Billy Bragg on ‘Which Side Are You On?’.
She typifies one branch of the bluegrass community, the branch that held that the intensity of the material was paramount, the branch whose lyrical themes were descended, more or less uninterrupted, from the narrative ballads that had crossed the Atlantic from Europe, where they had often had their roots in unaccompanied performance. A close listen to Dickens singing ‘Black Lung’ (or indeed someone like her near contemporary Dr. Ralph Stanley singing Matty Groves) reveals direct familial tie to sean nós and its equivalents elsewhere in Europe. It is the branch of the tradition which managed to avoid the hideous sterility of those bluegrass musicians who grew increasingly obsessed with technique, with a devotion to clinical accuracy in the playing to the detriment of the song’s emotional core.
Like Ralph Stanley, she continued to play regularly, appearing a few weeks ago at SWSX in Austin, Texas where, hunched over with arthritis and barely able to hold down chord shapes on the guitar, she nevertheless managed to captivate what would be her last major audience with a vocal power that remained undimmed.
Growing up in England in the ‘70s, Poly Styrene would have heard any amount of sterile, immaculately performed but ultimately vacuous folk music. In England, more than anywhere else, folk music had succumbed to the twee, the effete and its proponents were the butt of the nascent punk movement’s vitriol. ‘Hippie’ was one of the most barbed of insults, but in point of fact it was almost invariably directed at folkies, as hippies in the true sense were fairly thin on the ground. Punk seized the same political and social agenda as the brand of folk espoused by Hazel Dickens and although the musical forms were different, the feminist and anti-consumerist themes that Poly Styrene and X Ray Spex tackled head-on were not lessened by a certain crudity in the delivery. Indeed Poly Styrene was expressing exactly the same demand for female self-determination as Hazel Dickens, in her way. Dickens too would have appreciated the perceptively anti-consumerist drive of ‘Germ Free Adolescent’, which awakened a generation to the way in which they were manipulated by corporate commercial entities.
After being misdiagnosed as a schizophrenic, Poly Styrene withdrew from performance and recording for a time, and although it was a retrograde step for punk as a movement, it did in hindsight preserve the band’s reputation as the creators of a tiny but perfect repertoire. Over the next 30 years, she made sporadic forays back into the world of recording, the last Generation Indigo released just weeks before her death.
Anyone expecting a re-hash of the music she made in the heyday of punk will find themselves well wide of the mark, the album’s production style suggests an irreverent and socially aware Lady Gaga. However, there are some truly great songs on it, most notably ‘No Rockefeller’, a glorious slice of dub reggae eulogising the world’s homeless and dispossessed.
Ultimately, both women will be remembered as idiosyncratic and individualistic voices with a passionate empathy for their gender, and for the working-class in which they were raised.