Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard
Sing Me Back Home: The DC Tapes, 1965-1969
Release Date: September 21, 2018
Musical trailblazers Hazel Dickens & Alice Gerrard
are revered today as pioneering women in bluegrass, two artists whose
musical partnership directly inspired future innovators like Naomi Judd,
Emmylou Harris, Tim O’Brien and Hot Rize, and even Bob Dylan. But in
Baltimore and Washington, DC in the 1960s, they were just two women with
prodigious musical talent and a shared love for the old songs of the
Appalachian countryside. Sharing their music at jam sessions, the two
discovered a musical kinship that brought them both far from their
original roots–Alice from her original home in Seattle and Hazel from
her childhood roots in West Virginia. Moving beyond the conventional
bluegrass instrumentation and repertoire, Hazel and Alice’s roving
curiosity gobbled up songs from all corners of the US, from crusty
country ballads to old stringband songs. They fused it all together into
a sound that was wholly their own, as innovative as bluegrass had
always been, and as raw and authentic as the mountain home the songs
first came from. The pure joy that Hazel and Alice found playing
together is perfectly captured on a set of newly unearthed recordings, Sing Me Back Home: The DC Tapes, 1965-1969, out September 21 on Free Dirt Records.
All but one of the songs have never before been commercially released
by the duo. Sourced from Alice's private archive and digitized with help
from the Southern Folklife Collection at UNC Chapel Hill, the
recordings invite us to witness the creative process of these towering
figures—just two voices and a handful of instruments working out
arrangements at home. Across 19 tracks, the duo sings the classic
country of The Carter Family, The Louvin Brothers, and Jimmie Rodgers;
contemporary hits of the 1960s penned by Dolly Parton and Merle Haggard;
and barn-burning traditional standards. Sing Me Back Home is a raw, unfiltered listen to Hazel & Alice at the height of their collaborative energy.
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