As if all the world’s wrongs had come to sit in her throat,
she wandered the Baltimore streets where the boardinghouse
signs warned those like her looking for factory work: No Dogs
or Hillbillies. She settled in Little Appalachia amid her rough
refugees who journeyed north when the mines mechanized,
the coal bosses commanding the mountains stripped and gutted.
She dug her way in, unearthed her voice, the one
she had used back home when her daddy would call her out
to sing for neighbors. But now there was a misery in her melodies,
a bad taste she chased with words that cut to the truth like the coal
seams her brothers laid bare in the mines. If you can’t stand
by me, don’t stand in my way. Her rawness split hearts open,
her tunes hypnotized sickness and beat back grief and lack.
She bellowed down mean men, murderers, union busters.
People quit making fun of the hillbilly in her talk
and celebrated the worker, the fallen, the bereaved.