When Hazel Dickens died in 2011, major outlets reported her birth year as 1935. Her family corrected the record: she was born June 1, 1925, in Montcalm, Mercer County, West Virginia, one of eleven children in a coal-mining family whose father was a Primitive Baptist minister and banjo player. That extra decade matters, because it places her childhood squarely in the coal camps whose struggles she would later put into song.

This episode follows her to Baltimore in the Great Appalachian Migration, onto a factory floor, and into the folk and bluegrass scene after her brother met Mike Seeger in a tuberculosis hospital. It covers her partnership with Alice Gerrard as one of the first female-led bluegrass acts, the Folkways and Rounder records, her explicitly pro-union and feminist solo work after 1976, the four songs she contributed to the Oscar-winning documentary Harlan County, USA, and the honors that followed, from the 1994 IBMA Merit Award to the 2001 National Heritage Fellowship and 2017 Bluegrass Hall of Fame induction.

• How Primitive Baptist a cappella singing shaped her raw, unaccompanied vocal style
• Why Hazel and Alice bypassed the male-dominated bluegrass circuit for folk clubs and college campuses
• Black lung, her brother Thurman’s death, and how personal grief became a public anthem
• Her music in Matewan, Songcatcher and the documentary about her own life
• The feminist punk band Le Tigre name-checking her in a song