Peter, I just happened to have the Dorsey Dixon Babies in the Mill CD on my desk. I pulled it out today to listen to "Burglar Man," which is being discussed in another thread. I think I'll ask Mr. Scanner to post the information from the CD booklet.
-Joe Offer-

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The association of American folksong with southern rural life is so appealing that when hearing native song one visualizes cabins in cotton patches or cabins framed by mountain pines. Yet, since the Civil War, many cabin-like dwellings were hammered together in drab southern mill and factory towns.
Dorsey Murdock Dixon was born in such an industrial village. All his life he worked in textiles, and he still lives a stone's throw from his former work site, the Aleo Mill, East Rockingham, North Carolina.
Dorsey Dixon does not conceive his role as a champion or chronicler of his fellow textile workers. His self-perception is that of an evangelical Christian teaching gospel with song, a country-sacred song composer, and even a popular entertainer. Yet this portrait fits thousands of individuals, amateur and professional, who have created, carried, and cared for folksong.
Dorsey is distinguished from his peers precisely because he adds to the normal characterization of the hillbilly musician a deep knowledge and feeling for industrial life. Except for a few dollars earned on the radio and in phonograph recording studios, his fortune has been that of a "millhand," and he has been gifted enough to weave the tone of his own experience into a handful of industrial songs presented here on his first LP. This record includes work, sacred and secular songs and ballads sung by Dorsey as well as by his sister Nancy and late brother Howard. They, too, were Aleo workers. Nancy retired from spinning in 1954, and Howard, a skilled cloth-room machine fixer, was stricken at work on March 24, 1961.
Southern textile workers came to their industry primarily from two areas: tenant farms in the Piedmont and lowlands or mountain subsistence farms. The Dixons stemmed from Carolina's coastal section; their date of transition from agrarian to factory life is unknown. Dorsey's father was a mechanic in wood and iron. At Dorsey's birth (October 54, 1897), his father worked for the Darlington (South Carolina) Cotton Manufacturing Company as a steam engine operator.
Seven children were born to Mr. and Mrs. William McQuiller Dixon; three made a significant folksong contribution. Dorsey's older sister Nancy Alena (born October 23, 1892) began work at the age of eight as a child spinner in the Darlington mill for eight cents a day. Dorsey followed her to work at 12; at 13 he was on his own in the mill's machine shop making bobbin bands. He got away from the factory for some four years during World War I by working as a railway signalman (block-house leverman flagging trains(on the Atlantic Coast Line in Darlington. By concealing his age, Howard Briten (born June 19, 1903) was able to join his older brother in the ACL tower for a few years, but when Dorsey gravitated back to the mills, Howard followed. From 1919 until his eyes "gave out" in 1951, Dorsey worked regularly in cotton mills at Darlington, Lancaster, and Creenville, S. C., at "home" in East Rockingham, N.C.; and during 1947 in a New Jersey rayon plant. Even after leaving the mills (1951), he continued industrial work in a Baltimore munitions plant box factory.
Dorsey married Beatrice Lucele Moody, a South Carolina textile girl, in 1927; four boys were born to them. When the boys grew up and left home, he and his wife separated (1953). Now alone in the world and unable to work, Dorsey sustains himself by music and faith. Fortunately his creative talent is abundant and he feels blessed that at least one of his compositions, "Wreck on the Highway," (initially popularized by Roy Acuff) has become both a country song classic and folksong during his lifetime.
Although Dixon and his songlore deserve extended study, one can only comment briefly here on his career. His musical skill was apparent in his fifth year when he began to sing his mother's hymns and sentimental ballads. At 14 he taught himself the guitar. A local music teacher gave him violin lessons and Dorsey played in Darlington's Sunday schools. Some years later, after Howard had picked up the guitar, the brothers performed fiddle-guitar duets in the Rockingham movie theater. Dixon's turn to song composition did not come until his third decade. In May, 1923 a South Carolina schoolhouse (near Camden) burned, killing 76 children. The tragedy's impact on Dorsey was great but delayed; during 1929 he wrote a poem, "The Cleveland Schoolhouse Fire," which his mother and Howard
started to sing to the tune of "Life's Railway to Heaven." Aware of his skill as a songwriter, he began an activity that continues until today.
Along with composition, Dorsey gradually developed a highly personal guitar style, using a pick on each finger and the thumb of his right hand. Until 1935 he had always "frammed" (banged), but now he was inspired by Jimmie Tarlton, a fantastically gifted guitarist-singer temporarily employed in East Rockingham's Little Hanna Pickett Mill. (Tarlton was one of many textile workers who moved from the mills to music, having recorded "Birmingham Jail" and "Columbus Stockade Blues" for Columbia before meeting the Dixons.) Howard shared his brother's musicality and now left the straight guitar in favor of Hawaiian (steel) guitar style; his model also was Jimmie Tarlton. Dorsey and Howard formed a team in 1932 to entertain at church and in the village; they also performed during an early trade union drive in the Richmond County, N. C., mills. The Dixon Brothers first played "for gain" in 1934 on Charlotte's radio station, WBT, as participants on J. W. Fincher's Crazy Water Crystals Saturday Night Jamboree. In Charlotte they met and exchanged material with many fine Tar Heel radio and recording artists; Fisher Hendley, Snuffy Jenkins, Homer Sherill, Dick Hartman, J. E. and Wade Mainer, the Tennessee Ramblers, the Briarhoppers, the Three Tobacco Tags, the Blue Sky Boys.
The Dixon Brothers made their own phonograph recording debut February 12, 1936, in Charlotte for Victor's A & R man, Eli Oberstein. Periodically they returned for five more sessions and ended their recording career on a final Rock Hill, S. C., trip, September 25, 1938, having placed more than 60 numbers on wax.
For a few selections Dorsey was joined by his wife Beatrice and on others Howard was joined by his fellow mill-musicians Frank Gerald and Mutt Evans. All Dixon Brothers discs were originally released on two labels: Bluebird or Montgomery Ward. One song alone, "Intoxicated Rat," was reissued by Victor in 1941 on its Smoky Mountain Ballads album. Between 1936-1938 Oberstein assigned copyrights of Dorsey's material to various publishers; in some cases other performers shared claims to his work. Dorsey and Howard were paid normally (nominally) for their radio and recording work. Such fees were not enough to free them from the mills in the 1930's. Howard, at the age of 17, had married a mill girl and together they raised a family of eight children. Dorsey's third boy was born during the recording years. Like many fellow composers whose culture was poverty, Dorsey knew that his songs had monetary value, but he could never quite make the connections in the music industry to protect his prolific talent.
My personal interest in the Dixon Brothers stemmed from acquiring "Weaver's Life" and "Weave Room Blues" on 78 rpm records after World War II. I was unable to meet Howard before his death, but I did meet Dorsey at home in the summer of '961 while on a field trip with Ed Kahn of UCLA. A year later (August 6-8, 1962) Gene Earle and I visited East Rockingham and taped the material on this disc. For the session Dorsey accompanied himself on a Gibson Jumbo 45 guitar. Fortunately, we were also able to meet his sister Nancy, nearly 70 years old, and to collect two nineteenth century textile folksongs from her. To contrast Dorsey's 1962 material with Dixon Brothers style of the 1930's, RCA Victor has permitted Testament Records to reissue three original Bluebird records on this LP.
During 1963 Dorsey Dixon participated in the Newport Festival and three of his concert performances are now available on Old Time Music at Newport (Vanguard VRS 9147). Subsequently he journeyed to Washington, D. C., for a short engagement in several clubs as well as a recording session for Piedmont Records and the Library of Congress. Here, on November 1, 1963, he deposited 22 pieces in the Archive of Folksong; two months later he taped 16 more as a gift to the Archive.
Students of American labor have compiled extensive studies of the southern textile industry and its "lintheads" and "millhands" (Dictionaries are not needed to gloss these demeaning terms.) Beyond social science research, many novelists and poets have been attracted to the red brick mills of the old South ensconced behind their barbed wire fences and para-military guard posts. Sherwood Anderson, particularly, felt the warmth and cold and saw the light and shadow of mill life. From within their hearts, and while still stationed at their looms and shuttles, Dorsey, Howard, and Nancy Dixon added a dimension of folk music to American industrial history and literature.

Recorded & Produced by Gene Earle & Archie Green
Edited by Gene Earle & John Schmidt
Mastered by Bob Stone Mastering
Original Cover Design by A. Doyle Moore
Liner notes by Archie Green
Reissue Design by Brian Walls
Cover photo by Lewis W Hine, taken in a South Carolina cotton mill 1908. Used by courtesy, National Child Labor Committee, New York.

Songs on the CD:

1. Babies in the Mill
   
2. Weave Room Blues
   
3. I Saw the Wood
   
4. Across the Shining River
   
5. Hard Times in Here (Solo by Nancy)
   
6. Hard Times in Here
   
7. Christmas Cake
   
8. Will the Circle Be Unbroken
   
9. Be at Home Soon Tonight
   
10. Pin Ball Machine
    
11. Wreck of the Old 97
    
12. Factory Girl (solo by Nancy)
    
13. Factory Girl
    
14. Weaver's Life
    
15. Burglar Man
    
16. Wreck on the Highway
    
17. Somebody Touched Me
    
18. Our Johnny
    
19. Girl I left in Danville

All tracks written by Dorsey Dixon and published by Testament Music. (Can that be true?? -JRO-) The copyright on the CD is 1997 (by HMG/Hightone Records), but I can't figure out the date of the original recording - 1960's, apparently. I guess Dorsey Dixon must be dead by now.

-Joe Offer-

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I question the claim that all thse songs were written by Dorsey Dixon. The CD's version of "Can the Circle Be Unbroken" is very similar to the version posted by George Seto here (click) attributed to Fanny Crosby. And how about "Wreck of the Old 97"?
The singing is extraordinary, but I think many of the songs predate Dorsey Dixon.
-JRO-