We received the sad news late last week that musician Hazel Dickens died at the age of 75. 

She was the subject and co-author (with Bill Malone) of the 2008 University of Illinois Press book Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens.

From The New York Times’ obituary:
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.