Hazel Dickens passed away. I first heard her do "Coal Tattoo" on a cassette tape of protest songs. She also did some of the music for the movie "Matewan". She appeared in "Matewan" and "Harlan County". Dickens was also involved in the musical arm of the Civil Rights movement, touring the South with the Southern Folk Cultural Revival Project. She was probably best known for her feminist/worker songs but saw herself as a humanist. She was a good guitarist as well as singer. She had a unique voice. 
Obit Hazel Dickens, a clarion-voiced advocate for coal miners and working people and a pioneer among women in bluegrass music, died on Friday in Washington. She was 75.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Ken Irwin, her longtime friend and the founder of Rounder Records, her label for more than four decades.
Ms. Dickens’s initial impact came as a member of Hazel and Alice, a vocal and instrumental duo with Alice Gerrard, a classically trained singer with a passion for the American vernacular music on which Ms. Dickens was raised. Featuring Ms. Dickens on upright bass and Ms. Gerrard on acoustic guitar, Hazel and Alice toured widely on the folk and bluegrass circuits during the 1960s and ’70s, captivating audiences with their bold, forceful harmonies and their empathetic approach to songs of struggle and heartbreak.
They recorded four albums during this period, the first of which, “Who’s That Knocking,” for Folkways in 1965, is considered one of the earliest bluegrass records made by women. All-female string bands like the Coon Creek Girls had been popular before the emergence of bluegrass in the 1940s and ’50s, and female country singers like Rose Maddox and Jean Shepard occasionally released bluegrass-themed projects. But Hazel and Alice were expressly a bluegrass act, using the same tenor- and lead-vocal arrangements as many of their male counterparts.
Ms. Dickens reflected on her early days on the bluegrass circuit with Ms. Gerrard in a 1999 interview for the American roots music magazine No Depression. “I’m not sure if they looked at us as a novelty, or if they took us seriously,” she said of the male acts with whom they shared bills. But, she added, “There were a lot of them, especially down through the years, that gave us respect.”
The influence of the staunchly traditional duo extended beyond bluegrass to commercial country music. Hazel and Alice’s arrangement of the Carter Family’s “Hello Stranger” became the blueprint for Emmylou Harris’s version of the song, and their adaption of “The Sweetest Gift (A Mother’s Smile)” inspired Naomi Judd, then a single mother in rural Kentucky, to start singing with her daughter Wynonna.
Long revered by feminists, Ms. Dickens’s music, and especially her songwriting, assumed an even more political cast almost as soon as she began pursuing a solo career in the wake of the duo’s breakup in 1976. Several of her songs, including “Coal Tattoo” and the rousing organizer’s anthem “They'll Never Keep Us Down,” served as the musical voice of conscience for Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning 1976 documentary, “Harlan County, U.S.A.”
Whether she performed solo or with a country-style band, Ms. Dickens’s atavistic mountain inflection and delivery were inimitable, and never so much as when she sang a cappella on “Black Lung,” a harrowing dirge she wrote for her oldest brother, who died of that disease. In 1987 she sang another a cappella ballad, “Hills of Galilee,” during a funeral scene in “Matewan,” John Sayles’s movie about coal mining in Appalachia....
