When Hazel Dickens died in 2011, major outlets reported her birth year as 1935. Her family corrected the record: she was born June 1, 1925, in Montcalm, Mercer County, West Virginia, one of eleven children in a coal-mining family whose father was a Primitive Baptist minister and banjo player. That extra decade matters, because it places her childhood squarely in the coal camps whose struggles she would later put into song.

This episode follows her to Baltimore in the Great Appalachian Migration, onto a factory floor, and into the folk and bluegrass scene after her brother met Mike Seeger in a tuberculosis hospital. It covers her partnership with Alice Gerrard as one of the first female-led bluegrass acts, the Folkways and Rounder records, her explicitly pro-union and feminist solo work after 1976, the four songs she contributed to the Oscar ...