Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
From Ralph Rinzler's 1980 Notes to "Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People"
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Music
In his May 1980 liner notes to Hazel Dickens' Hard Hitting Songs for Hard Hit People vinyl album, which Rounder Records distributed, Folk Music Historian Ralph Rinzler of the Smithsonian Institution wrote the following:
"All working musicians are faced with choices continually, and some choose to shape their musical styles and their messages to the tastes of the market--or at least to what they or their agents may perceive to be those tastes. Other artists, like Hazel, have their eyes fixed on other goals. Hazel has been successful in matching her musical styles to her ideas while creating a varied repertoire. She sings many songs which she did not write herself. Some come out of the oldest cut of Anglo-American folksong traditions to have been found in Southern Appalachia. Others are from the more recent country music traditions of the past half-century. She sings these in her own style which combines elements of Southern church singing, country and bluegrass styles of the past 40 years and occasionally she will sing a ballad or song without any instrumental accompaniment drawing on the most archaic of Appalachian vocal traditions. All of these styles she comes by naturally having grown up in a religious and musical mountain family.
"What is unmistakeable, whether she is singing on a picket line, in a concert hall, or at a national convention of the United Mine Workers, is that Hazel has chosen to put herself and her music to work for the benefit of people faced with struggle--for wages, for rights, for their very survival...The people know it...And generations who follow us and who have forgotten the top ten tunes on today's pop and country music charts will know and respect it because hers is art of timeless and enduring values."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=6#ixzz0zML1M9Il
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