Few singers have fused lonesome beauty and political passion in the way Hazel Dickens has, though with her voice she could deliver a speech by Newt Gingrich and still break your heart. She writes like a bluegrass-trained Woody Guthrie and...more.

The thing that amazes me about Hazel Dickens is her breathtaking lyrical ability. The music is absolutely superb, and well produced, but it's the lyrical power of songs like "Lost Patterns" that leave me completely speechless. She is actually singing...more.

I think Hazel Dicken's lyrics and her delivery of the music written by others as well as her own is as relevant to today's rural areas as it was over 20 years ago. She isn't "commercial country" -- just...more.

This music is clear-eyed, bright, and hard. "Aragon Mill," "Tommorow's Already Lost," and, well, everything else is impossibly beautiful and harsh. There are a lot of over used adjectives for deeply American music like this, and they really all...more.

This is a great album by a singer-songwriter who has lived a hard life -- one of 11 children in poverty-stricken West Virginia, watching her brother die from black lung disease, leaving home at 16 to work in the factories...more.