Dorsey Dixon’s claim to fame is as the writer of “Wreck On The Highway”, a song popularized by Roy Acuff and, by all rights, a country standard. Along with fellow Tar Heels the Blue Sky Boys, Dorsey and his brother, Howard, were among the earliest and most influential brother duos, represented here by three of their Bluebird sides from the 1930s. Jimmie Rodgers’ influence is evident on the yodeling and Hawaiian steel guitar of “Weave Room Blues”, one of two Dixon originals drawn from the duo’s years toiling in the Carolina textile mills. Elsewhere, Dorsey’s percussive fingerpicking and the brothers’ hound dog harmonies are as inexorable as the oppressive life they knew.
In many ways, though, the remaining 16 songs collected here, originally released on Pete Welding’s Testament label in 1962, present a more complete picture of Dorsey Dixon’s life and art. Except for adaptations of a handful of Appalachian folk and gospel standards, these recordings function as a concept album chronicling the harshness and hazards of life in the mills.
Particularly haunting are sister Nancy’s renderings of two 19th-century spinner’s folk songs, “Factory Girl” and “Hard Times In Here”. But perhaps most devastating is the title track, a tale of child labor abuse that Dixon imbues with Dickensian pathos. “To their jobs those little ones were strictly forced to go,” he moans. “Those babies had to be on time through rain and sleet and snow/Many times when things went wrong their bosses often frowned/Many times those little ones was kicked and shoved around.”
For vision and scope, Babies In The Mill is to the mill worker’s life what Aunt Molly Jackson’s Library of Congress recordings are to the world of coal miners, and what Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads is to the struggles of uprooted Okies.
