#ThisIsAppalachia: Hazel Dickens

I’m Still Singing Your Song

By Kathy Johnson, October 13, 2020

I first heard Hazel Dickens sing in the fall of 1979, one of my first days living in the Fort Sanders neighborhood during my first year in college, my one year at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. I can’t remember who so wanted me to listen to the “self-titled” Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, only that I argued feebly with that person about it. How to explain how very much I did NOT want to listen to bluegrass music? How to explain that I was ashamed of having a Mama who always had the Osborne Brothers on the TV Saturday evenings? And a Daddy who, every time he felt too sad, would repeatedly play an ancient bluegrass record about a bluebird? That song was Daddy’s bluebird of sadness. And then there were the singings when our normally terminally sedate Methodist congregation would bring in a bluegrass gospel band and, Lord help, they would party as only tee-totaling Methodists can ….And then there was the way Oak Ridge High School sneered at Clinton High School where we all insulted each other with the words “redneck” and “hillbilly.”So how dare this person who only met me a minute or so ago – just like every other person in that room. Here I was doing my 17-year-old best to be intelligent and sophisticated and immediately, my second day in the city, someone’s got me pegged as someone who would “just love” a bluegrass album AND they were doing so loudly and in public.If the album cover hadn’t screamed “hippy” quite so loudly, I don’t think I would ever have taken a listen. But I did, later, when I was alone, when no one else could know that I was listening to the dread music, tempted by the look on the album cover, I gave it a listen and something in me started to heal. If that person hadn’t insisted, if the album cover hadn’t reassured my self-hating snobby little self, if I hadn’t been the kind of girl who listened to lyrics, then I never would’ve heard Hazel and, maybe I’d still today be the screwed up person I was that fall of 1979. As it was, I learned “West Virginia My Home” and knew it was a song about the secret way I felt my last night in Wolf Valley. As it was, I learned “Mary Johnson” the best song EVER about “what part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?” As it was, I spent the next decade tormenting neighbors by stomping around my apartment at midnight taking after my Daddy and singing along with “Banjo Pickin’ Girl.” That album went with me through all the cities and jobs and hassles to come over the next decade.In short, Hazel Dickens had everything to do with teaching me that it was okay, OKAY! to be me. We were so different, but we were both Appalachian women and her songs never showed one lick of doubt or shame about it. Do you know how healing that was for me? I never met the woman. I never went to one of her concerts. In fact, I don’t own all her work. She helped heal the shame. Thank you, Hazel Dickens.I no longer have that old Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard album. It got lost in my wandering.A decade later, I heard her again in February 2003. Back in Knoxville after my long wandering, I was on my way back home from protesting the idea of invading Iraq. I was cold but exhilarated because I had the extremely stupid idea that because so very many people – 1,000 of us at least even in Knoxville, TN! – opposed it, then it wouldn’t happen. If so, many knew before it happened that it was based on a lie, surely …. But then on the radio (“East Tennessee’s Own – WDVX”) here came Hazel Dickens back into my life, singing a song I’d never heard before,

“I saw a grey-haired mother crying softly in her door

As she gazed upon the pathway where he’d return no more

‘Oh Lord I’d love to hold my baby just once more

And Lord I hope I never live to see another war.’

Chorus

Will Jesus warsh the bloodstains from your hands?

Will He welcome you into that peaceful land?

Will He forgive the killing, the wars you have planned?

Will Jesus warsh the bloodstains from your hands?

Well the bombs you’ve dropped, the guns you’ve shot

All in the name of peace.

While the people begged for mercy

you gave them no release.

There’s blood on your hands mister

You’ll answer for one day,

And the tears you shed on that day

Won’t wash your sins away

Now you say we could survive a nuclear war,

And that you would use limits, you’d only go so far.

Well Hiroshima’s horrors we’ll never forget

For bloodthirsty warriors don’t know when to quit

I soon bought the CD, It’s Hard to Tell the Singer From the Song, and I learned to sing “Will Jesus Warsh the Bloodstains from Your Hands,” singing it to myself repeatedly, for years in the car alone, with my husband, in the woods, always alone until one day a friend came with me to the Hiroshima Day protest in Oak Ridge. As we were driving back home, she sang me some gentle, more mainstream folk songs about war and peace. I sang “Will Jesus Warsh the Bloodstains” for her. I don’t know if it was the lyrics or my not-so-great voice, but she was obviously shocked. All she said was “that’s awful angry, isn’t it.?”All I could reply was “if war doesn’t make you angry, what will?” And there the conversation ended.As I age, I find I don’t get as angry as I used to and I often wonder if that’s a good thing. On the liner notes to It’s Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song, Hazel Dickens says she wrote “Will Jesus Warsh the Bloodstains” for Nixon and then updated it for Reagan. I learned it during the unfortunate time of Bush II, kept singing it for Obama, and now I’m singing it for Trump. Hazel, I’m so sorry, but I’m still singing your song.

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Photo above  is from Appalshop’s Hazel Dickens: Its Hard to Tell the Singer From the Song https://appalshop.org/shop/hazel-dickens-its-hard-to-tell-the-singer-from-the-song