Rubble and rock
The bands in Detroit – amid the hype and attention – are getting drunk, playing music, and having a whole lot of fun.
By Jimmy Draper

Detroit Bands
By Jimmy Draper

Tongue untied
Satoko Fujii frees her mind – and the music follows.
By Derk Richardson

No rhinestones, ever
There's no glitter on roots singer-songwriters Kim Richey and Hazel Dickens.
By Kimberly Chun

Correct Techniques
Connections
By Mosi Reeves

No rhinestones, ever

There's no glitter on roots singer-songwriters Kim Richey and Hazel Dickens.

By Kimberly Chun

CHANCES ARE KIM Richey and Hazel Dickens will never pop up on VH1's Divas Live, but on the male-dominated stages of bluegrass – with perhaps the exception of this weekend's Strictly Bluegrass festival – these back-roads performers come across like mountain, or Midwestern, Madonnas. Still, the singer-songwriters couldn't be further apart on the spectrum of Southern roots music. These women seem to have little in common – except the acoustic guitars slung over their shoulders and the fact that they could walk through the mall, or your average music store, completely unnoticed.

Blond, scrappy, and with more than a small share of wanderlust, Richey took the long, dues-paying route from the flatlands of Ohio into the heart of the Nashville establishment – with an eye always on the '80s Americana outlaws of Austin, Texas. Her new album of elegant, rootsy pop conceived in northern California is as far from bluegrass as the West Coast is from West Virginia – and it promises to be the critical and commercial breakthrough she has been working toward for decades.

On the other hand, Dickens, a dark, raw-boned daughter of central Appalachia, embodies the high, lonesome sound bluegrass traditionalists cherish. Jealously guarding her independence and never bothering to fall into step with a mainstream marketplace, she hasn't recorded a studio full-length since 1987.

Stylistically, they are as different as North and South. Yet somehow both represent the divided spirit of bluegrass today, one that's making inroads on the Billboard charts in the form of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack (at press time, the veritable Dark Side of the Moon of hillbilly music is still ascendant among Billboard's top five country albums, 94 weeks into its reign), yet many other bluegrass artists, apart from Alison Krauss and Nickel Creek, remain shut out.

Industry trends, however, are the last thing on Dickens's mind. Whereas other artists may find satisfaction in their SoundScan sales figures, Dickens finds her career highs on, for instance, a coal miners' picket line.

"I was apologizing because it was so rainy and muddy, and I was apologizing because I didn't get a chance to dress up, and a woman said, 'Oh, that's all right, honey. You look like us. You look like one of us,' " she recalls. "And that was, you know, a big compliment."

Taking a break from practice in her Washington, D.C., apartment, the 65-year-old Dickens punctuates her story with soft coughs. Allergies and travel-related health problems plague her nowadays, but she still makes time to participate in labor rallies, miners' conventions, and teach-ins, and she still feels guilty if she doesn't quite connect every face with a name.

"That's what I really wanted to be accepted as: somebody that's not all that different. Not somebody that looks all Hollywood or Nashville, with sequins and everything."

On the 'Rise'

Richey – currently in the process of moving into a small urban apartment in Austin – is a different story. But when she first relocated to Nashville more than a dozen years ago, the thought of becoming a rhinestone cowgirl didn't sound entirely unappealing.

Unlike the dozens of songwriters who spend years banging their heads against the corporate wall of country music, Richey was able to break through and became a successful staff writer for the Nashville company Bluewater Music, penning tunes for the Dixie Chicks and Patty Loveless, as well as the hits "Nobody Wins" and "Believe Me, Baby (I Lied)," for Radney Foster and Trisha Yearwood, respectively.

But Richey longed to perform, and when she couldn't pass the muster of A&R personnel who were busy looking for the next Barbara Mandrell and were finding her in the likes of Shania Twain and Faith Hill, she decided to throw in the towel. Her life was starting to sound like a country music cliché.

"I was just exhausted by all of it," she says on the phone from Austin as she remembers calling a meeting with her publishers. "I called 'em in and said, 'You know, I just don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to be a recording artist. This is too hard, you know. You just feel judged all the time, and you're not good enough, and it's just bumming me out, and I don't want to do it anymore,' and I was really upset and crying."

But she soon realized that giving up her dream would be more painful.

"As soon as I let go of it, I thought, 'Well, maybe I changed my mind back. Never mind, you know. Forget I was here and called this meeting,' " she says now, cackling. "So we kept trying to get a record deal, and eventually it happened when I didn't really care too much if it happened anymore."

She laughs lightheartedly, speaking in an indeterminate accent that's the product of her hometown of Dayton, Ohio, her longtime residence in Nashville, and her new life in Austin, with stops in Colorado and Bellingham, Wash., in between. At the same time, it's hard to imagine this somewhat guarded woman breaking down and blubbering in front of her colleagues.

Richey's new album, Rise, could be the one that installs her firmly in the pantheon of contemporary female singer-songwriters such as Lucinda Williams – or establishes her in the pop realm alongside Sheryl Crow, a past client of her latest producer, Bill Bottrell. The album brims with eclectic instrumentation (a bouzouki here, a Qchord keyboard there), strong, simple writing, and the eccentric, moody pop last heard on I Am Shelby Lynne, which Bottrell produced for another Nashville refugee. But instead of bubbling excitedly about the release, the 45-year-old Richey maintains the reserve of a veteran who has been burned one time too often. A vocalist with a heavenly, girlish soprano on record, Richey off record is as grounded and earthy as they come, though she's armed with the professional wariness of someone who has been working behind the scenes in the music business long enough to know that a clever, too-revealing quip is no substitute for a career.

There was no overarching grand plan for the album, she insists. Nonetheless, the making of Rise comes off like a consummation of a successful professional relationship – between Richey, Bottrell, bassist Birdie, drummer Brian MacLeod, and Richey's friends Chuck Prophet and Pete Droge – and Richey is reluctant to destroy it by dissecting too vigorously.

She initially went up to Mendocino to work with Bottrell and Birdie on a "blind date" and see if they got along. "The first date was pretty wacky," Richey says. "I went up there to supposedly do some writing, and first off, he and his band [the Stokemen] had a gig, so I went to that with them, and it was at the Hog Farm, so there we are with the hippies and the land that time forgot, and they put us up in teepees. So it was pretty wacky, but it was fun, and I got back and I was like, 'I don't know about this place. I don't know what the deal is here then with Bill.' "

The pairing ended up being one of the most creative experiences she has had in the studio. "It was kind of more playin' than workin'. Some of the interesting instrument choices were inspired by Brian's shopping habits," she says with a laugh. "Those guys are also big thrifters. One day Brian just shows up with a bouzouki. For some unknown reason he thought he needed to have a bouzouki, because he doesn't even play it, and so we ended up having that on two or three songs, which is a pretty cool sound and different."

She's hesitant to peg the songs in any way – protesting at the suggestion that they all revolve around relationships. She hedges about songs such as "Cowards in a Brave New World." That track doesn't necessarily espouse pacifism, unless you want it to.

"I think you can say stuff about larger topics by keeping them small and concentrated in the world that I know, my own life," she says.

But the evasive singer-songwriter's guard finally drops when she hears that her upcoming appearance in the Bay Area is at an event dubbed "Strictly Bluegrass." That's the first time she's heard that. "Cool," she laughs. "People have always had trouble categorizing the stuff that I do, like a lot of other people that don't fit strictly into one kind of formula or genre. I think a lot of festivals like this don't have to be strictly bluegrass – it's just some kind of, um, real music by real people."

Hazelnuts

Dickens is as real as it gets. In the last year finally getting a measure of her due, the Montcalm, W.Va., native was forged by the fire and brimstone of Primitive Baptist sermonizing, soothed by its hymns, and marked by the tragedies of Appalachian mining culture (her oldest brother succumbed to black lung, as have other relatives). And there she remains, less than 400 miles from where she grew up, the eighth of 11 children, choosing her musical excursions away from her longtime D.C. apartment with care.

She has always been the consummate bluegrass insider – and outsider. Dickens roared onto the folk scene in the '60s with an unforgettable wail that caught the attention of die-hard old-time music advocates Mike Seeger (Pete Seeger's half-brother and a continuing Dickens partner) and Alice Gerrard, whom Dickens later collaborated with as a duo on Folkways and, later, Rounder recordings. She brought a unique perspective to the kitchen table jams. She was an intrinsic part of the folk revival, yet for her the music never really ended in the first place. At the time, she remembers, "everyone was kind of lean and green, and they hadn't gotten to the point where they expected a lot of money playing, and they didn't get it anyway, but they were there purely to do the music, and they were really excited about it, and people were just learning."

That's changed. "Nowadays people are so accomplished that it seems like to me, I don't know, that people go to critique what other people are doing – and that's just not right," she complains as sweetly as anyone could. "You need to go and just take in what other people are doing. I know this one guy who says, 'Oh! He made a mistake,' and I say, 'For goodness sakes, you're supposed to be here to enjoy the music, not critique what they're doing.' Back then, it seems like people just loved to get together. They got together to jam all the time; they got so excited when they found another song. People weren't road-weary and jaded."

There's no chance of that happening to Dickens, who says she's still shocked at the recent attention she has received, especially after she won a $10,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts last fall, followed by a lifetime achievement award from the International Folk Alliance Conference.

"It's still pretty hard for me to fathom because I'm a shy person, basically, and I'm not used to getting all this attention, and sometimes when it gets too close, I almost start to back off. It's almost like I'm saying, 'Why me?!' " she says with a dry little chuckle. "Sometimes, particularly when you've been kind of struggling all your life and a lot of things start happening at once, you're taken aback. You don't know how to accept it when it does come along."

Her music seemed to come as naturally as breath: it's a combination of the old-time music that her banjo-picking father played, protest songs such as "Black Lung," "hard" country by idols such as George Jones and Loretta Lynn, and protofeminist sentiments such as "Don't Put Her Down You Helped Put Her There." "We grew up with it, and I think, for us – it was a lot different for some people who just decide that they want to learn it and then they find a teacher," she explains. "The first sounds I ever heard were old-time music, the unaccompanied Primitive Baptist sound, and that was right after I was born, because my mother took me to church."

All of the kids in her family played one or two instruments, though when her father became a Primitive Baptist minister, he laid down his banjo. He continued to tower over the music selections in the household, however; the radio was tuned to the "Grand Ole Opry" and other music dictated by her father's taste.

He was obviously proud of Dickens. "I was kind of the one that took at it from a very young age, and my father would always kind of rag on me, 'You ought to see my daughter sing,' and then ask me to stand up and sing," she says with a laugh.

The song she often stood up to sing was "Man of Constant Sorrow." So naturally, she sounds a bit skeptical when she holds forth on the popularity of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? recording.

"Yeah, well, I just hope that it's real, you know," she says with a sigh. "I can be a skeptic sometimes, too. Sometimes I think if everybody jumps on the bandwagon or if there's a lot of interest in a certain direction, everybody else would come on board because they think it's the popular thing to do. I just hope that when it all dies and the dust settles, that people will remember where they heard that music and go seek other musics out. Because some of it is our own music.

"We don't have a lot of things here that we can point to as ours," she continues, picking up steam. "We created that. Of course, the Scottish and English and Irish try to claim it, and they did bring the initial music over here, and some came from Africa, too. But what was done there in the Appalachian area, those people did it on their own."

Her own music has been interrupted by ailments in the past year: work on songs for her first Rounder album in more than a decade has continued in fits and starts of inspiration. One protest song, "America's Poor," focuses on the post-NAFTA trials of a niece who trained fellow workers at a textile mill, only to have the entire plant move south of the border. Another, a love song titled "My Heart's Own Love," will make its way into at least one of her Bay Area appearances, which include a songwriting workshop, a concert, and a colloquium on activism and music at Mills College. A five-piece bluegrass lineup will accompany her at Strictly Bluegrass, but she plans on stripping back down for other performances, such as a Carter family tribute performance with Mike Seeger at the University of London that follows on the heels of the Bay Area shows. "Soon as I get back, I'll have one day to shower and do up my hair," she says, worrying a little about her full platter this month.

But she doesn't plan on having it any other way. Dickens doesn't harbor any hopes of going Hollywood – though her music has found greater exposure in films such as Harlan County, U.S.A., Matewan, Songcatcher, and the Dickens documentary It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song – or Nashville soon. "I thought I could be freer and have a lot more to say, not within the confines within all those restrictions that you have if you work for a major label. They put so much money into the production that you've got to do all kinds of things that you don't want to do. But I like the independent records better. It suits my style better," she says with a chortle, before adding, "The majors probably don't want me anyway."

Strictly Bluegrass runs Sat/5-Sun/6, 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Golden Gate Park, Speedway Meadow, S.F. Free. www.strictlybluegrass.com.

Kim Richey also plays Fri/4, 7 p.m., Cafe du Nord, 2170 Market, S.F. $15. (415) 861-5016.

Hazel Dickens also appears at "A Bay Area Tribute to Hazel Dickens: Celebrating a Life in Music and Political Activism" (colloquium Wed/2, noon-1 p.m.; songwriting workshop Wed/2, 7 p.m.; concert Thurs/3, 8 p.m.), Mills College, Concert Hall (colloquium at Lisser Theatre), 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakl. Workshop and concert free. (510) 430-2296, www.mills.edu.