Souls on Fire And Lonesome Dreams

HAZEL & ERIE

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF AMERICA’S FAVORITE BLUEGRASS LESBIANS

HAZEL JEANNE LATTISAW

&

ERELDINE (ERIE) MERELDA SLOCOMB

A Novel by Jason Taylor Morgan

SYNOPSIS

“When Hazel and Erie sang together, their songwriting and the chemistry of their voices was breathtaking – Lattisaw’s emotive birdsong anchored by Slocomb’s matchless tenor.” AMERICANA FOLKWAYS MAGAZINE

Prior to Hazel Lattisaw and Erie Slocomb, it was rare to see women headlining in bluegrass music. What made the partnership more unique, Hazel and Erie, both survivors of horrible Appalachian childhoods, were lovers since their teenage years in the late 1940s and early 50s in the hardscrabble coal hills of Mercer County, West Virginia. Together, they forged a broad swath through the cultural landscape of America as beloved, inspirational singer-songwriters, at the top of their genre. But even more as a famous lesbian couple who ‘came out’ to tremendous backlash and set new precedents for women back in the ideologically Stone Age American South, during the 1960s and 1970s.

SOULS ON FIRE AND LONESOME DREAMS, at 110,000 words, written as two separate (fictional) autobiographies, is dual narrative, with two narratives in each chapter. In this way, Hazel and Erie present themselves independently, in their own words, with their own priorities, interpretations, and focus. This gives the novel its counterbalance, deeper textures and unexpected rhythms, like harmony vocals - different melodies, different emphasis, in different places within the same song.

Hazel’s narrative presents the linear storyline. She recounts their journey as two young musically gifted gay girls from dire poverty in Appalachia, who fall in love with music, fall in love with each other and navigate the consequences. Then, take the long road to becoming two of the most successful and groundbreaking Bluegrass, Americana and Country Music stars of all-time. As well as unintentional Feminist and Lesbian Icons along the way.

Hazel presents herself as the more grounded, feminine one, while she offers her knowledge and insights into the complex character Erie is, and reveals the tumultuous thrill ride that is their relationship, their careers, and their lives. Erie’s narrative – calling herself in childhood a lesbian Huck Finn - follows no such linear road signs. A wild child, her narrative meanders, hovers and lands where she pleases.

Hazel’s narrative brings them out into the world as professional teenage performers in Chapter Three. Erie’s journey of trying to understand and resolve her appalling, traumatic childhood - to be true to herself, true to her wildness, true to her sexual identity, and to understand and control herself - keeps her narrative captive in West Virginia for much longer.

SOULS ON FIRE AND LONESOME DREAMS presents their incredible story from surviving dire poverty and neglect as children (Hazel, an only child, with Evangelical parents whose love for Jesus outshined their love for her, and pregnant and miscarrying at 13-years-old – Erie persecuted for her “boyishness and queeriness,” with fall down drunk parents and twelve or thirteen nameless, soulless sisters) to making a name for themselves as a local budding Bluegrass music duo … to leaving home in the mid-1950s and going out on the road and into the endless Southern country music circuit as naïve teenagers … vowing never to return to  Mercer County … making immediate impressions with the quality of their performances and fine songwriting … skirting or surviving sexual and 

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