Alice Gerrard’s autobiography, Custom Made Woman, is now available from the University of North Carolina Press.
For more than five decades, this bluegrass, folk, and old time trailblazer has expanded the definition of traditional music, starting in the 1960s alongside fellow pioneer Hazel Dickens. Together they recorded six albums, including many of their original songs. They also toured extensively as Hazel & Alice.
In addition Gerrard recorded with Mike Seeger and with Andy Cahan, and under her own name.
Hazel & Alice literally forced themselves onto the folk and bluegrass scene, at a time when female performers were quite thin on the ground. And they did it their own way, singing about topics not always familiar to old time and bluegrass audiences.
At 91 years of age, it’s quite a remarkable achievement to turn out a book like this, and possibly for that reason the text is broken into individual remembrances, some quite brief, and others many pages long. It works, however, a bit like a conversation with an old friend.
If you have read the excellent Still Inside – The Tony Rice Story by Tim Stafford and Caroline Wright, you’ll have seen this sort of layout before.
Alice also contributes a good many of the archival photos she has taken through the years, which accompany the various sections of her reminiscences.
Custom Made Woman can be ordered from UNC Press in hardcover for $30, or as an ebook for $19.99.
