I bought the two records that these were made of when they came out in the 60s and 70s. I was lucky enough to hear Hazel and Alice a few times back then, and later in the 70s, separately. There is nothing else like it, particularly Hazel's voice, oh haze's voice.
I still have chills up my spine like my buddy from Ohio Tribe, from hearing Hazel sing the Coal Minter's blues at a school auditorium in Birmingham in 1979. There is something about most bluegrass today that is either too slick, to pyrotechnically technically proficient, and just too damned unaccessable to the average person.
This is living room music, a place where Hazel and Alice started playing together back in the early 1960s in the DC-Baltimore area/ There may be great professionals like Chubby wise who played with Billie Monroe and then left to work for Flat and Scruggs, but this is friendly picking music and signing closer in spirit to old timey music than to much of current bluegrass. Alice was then married to Mike Seeger who spent much of the 1950s recording old time blues and country pickers on their front porches and living rooms, and some of that is passed on here.
These records were also made when they and I were young and their is a streak of wildness in some of these tunes (Cowboy Jim, the most unuptown version of Take Me Back to Tulsa ever recorded) that seems to have melted away with age.
Al I can say is Hazel Dickens Hazel Dickens Alice Gerrad alice Gerrad they rule