Posted on July 22nd, 2007 at 1:45 pm by admin
PRAISE FOR KAREN DALTON
“My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky, and sultry. I’d actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holliday’s and played guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”
- Bob Dylan on the Cafe Wha?, Chronicles Volume One, pg 12
”She is my favorite female blues singer.” - Nick Cave
“Without a doubt, she is my favorite singer.” - Devendra Banhart
“She sure can sing the sh*t out of the blues.” - Fred Neil
“Blues From Beyond The Grave” - NPR SONG OF THE DAY
“Out of This World, Catchy or Good for Driving” by Kim Gordon. KAREN DALTON: “She came out of the folk scene in the early ’60s. She was very influential on Bob Dylan and that whole Greenwich Village scene. She lived in Colorado, sang at a coffeehouse, and lived with her daughter out in the mountains in a cabin. She was eccentric. “Cotton Eye Joe: The Loop Tapes — Live in Boulder — 1962” (Delmore Recordings) was never released. It’s archival stuff that was recorded by the guy who owned the coffeehouse. You can hear in the recording that she’s playing in a small room, maybe 10 people. I like the intimacy of the record. It’s very melancholy. She had an out-of-this-world voice. She had a sad life, she had substance problems. For whatever reason she didn’t seek the limelight and was into just living life, as opposed to Dylan. She was no rock star.”
One of the endlessly repeated and therefore defining stories of Karen Dalton’s career is that she hated recording so much that she had to be tricked into laying down the songs on her 1969 debut, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best. That may be true, but by now it’s legend, portraying the contrary Okie as a true folk artist who rejected the commercial enterprise of making and selling music. It’s not that cut and dry, of course: It seems she felt uncomfortable only with studios and practiced performances. In his liner notes for Koch Records’ 1997 reissue of her debut, Peter Stampfel recalls that when Dalton was scheduled to sing harmonies on a Holy Modal Rounders album, she spent hours psyching herself up for the task, at one point even ripping out a bathroom sink.
Recording– or, perhaps more specifically, being recorded– apparently didn’t trouble Dalton very much. Since her rediscovery in 2006 via Light in the Attic’s reissue of her second and final album, In My Own Time, two recordings from the early 1960s have surfaced: The first, the two-disc Cotton Eyed Joe, is a recording of a live performance at the Attic in Boulder, Colorado, captured by Joe Loop. Released less than a year later, Green Rocky Road is a more intimate set that Dalton recorded herself at home on the same reel-to-reel tapes. Acting as vocalist, accompanist, engineer, and producer, she overdubs guitar over her banjo tracks and even invites guitarist Richard Tucker and Loop to play on it. You can even hear the phone ringing and Dalton talking to her mother.
Green Rocky Road is a much different listening experience than Cotton Eyed Joe, which she performed specifically for the small crowd around her, who listen raptly and applaud heartily. If that release is public, then Green Rocky Road is pointedly private. Here Dalton entertains no one but herself. In addition to singing traditional ballads like “Nottingham Town” and “Skillet Good and Greasy”, she runs through pensive versions of “Ribbon Bow” and “Katie Cruel”, which would appear later on her first and second albums respectively. They have all the informality of someone thinking aloud, which suits her signature vocals perfectly. “Ribbon Bow” sounds careful and simmering, with Dalton reaching down into her lower register to sound uncharacteristically foreboding– an approach that adds a bit of malice to the lyrics. Her takes on “Katie Cruel” and “In the Evening” (which also appears on Cotton Eyed Joe) show just how malleable she considered these songs, open for any possible inflection or interpretation.
Dalton’s primary accompaniment, as always, is her trusty banjo, which she plays in a clawfinger style to give these songs a distinctive style that fits her free-floating vocals nicely. It rings out brightly on the cowboy song “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” and the lover’s lament “Red Rockin’ Chair”, and she adds dissonant notes to make “Nottingham Town” sound like a raga. In overdubbing, she seems to consider tempos and time signatures almost as restricting as a real studio. Opener “Green Rocky Road” overlays an acoustic guitar over her banjo, but the two instruments don’t always mesh, lending the song an unrehearsed emotional push and pull.
There’s no telling what purpose she intended for these recordings, or if the mere act of setting these songs to tape was the extent of her endeavor. Possibly she might have planned to record over them, or give them away, or store them in some dusty attic box for another generation. Whatever the case, Green Rocky Road stands as a particularly personal statement, a career marker that shows where she was and what songs obsessed her at a particular moment. That we can listen to these songs nearly half a century later is certainly a benefit, but it never feels like her primary concern. - Stephen M. Deusner, July 23, 2008
“Karen Dalton Lives” by Michael Simmons, 12/29/08
My favorite singer of 2008 has been dead for almost 16 years, yet “new” recordings by her continue to be released. For the second year running, a new Karen Dalton record is my choice for The Album of the Year. Read Complete Feature
Somewhere between the vocals of Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin sits Karen Dalton’s strong, cigarette-stained voice. Dalton was considered part of the folk revivalism movement of the 1960s; but rather than shun commercialism, she, along with greats like The Carter Family and Mississippi John Hurt, combined tradition with modernism for her authentic blend of folk music. Everyone from Bob Dylan to Devendra Banhart considers her to be one of the greatest singers of all time. Although she only recorded two studio albums, she left behind several home recordings of herself with her banjo circa 1962 or 1963. Green Rocky Road (Delmore Recordings) is part two of those remastered tracks (part one being last year’s Cotton Eyed Joe). It is said that her official releases were made under duress and thus possess an awkward, stoic quality. Green Rocky Road is Karen Dalton free, unhindered and unadulterated. With just two tracks to record her voice and banjo, Dalton plays earnest, honest old-time songs with only her voice, her banjo and the room itself. Her clawhammer style of playing is sturdy against her forceful, throaty vocals. Her bluegrass and Scruggs’ styles of picking are jaunty, tinny excursions. Everything about the recording is raw from the self-overdubs and brief tape malfunctions to the inclusion of background noises. In “Katie Cruel,” a telephone’s ringing and birds’ chirping help to envision what kind of surroundings she recorded in. A bright spring morning alone envelops the feeling of the track. In seamless, clawhammer style, Dalton brushes and thumbs intricate patterns of notes. Her low alto is not so much sultry as forced, stark and awkward. She sets up walls and barriers with her forceful voice, and her clawhammer strumming tears them all down. Cowboy song “Whoopie-Ti-Yi-Yo” is one of the highlights; it shimmers as Dalton’s voice hits its most forte moments, reverberating against the microphone and the tin strains of the banjo. Although the final track seems non sequitor with its acoustic guitar, blues nature, it still offers a glimpse at the late singer’s early guitar inklings. That being said, listening to each track feels like uncovering a lost, forgotten, valuable diary in a secret, hidden space in your grandmother’s house. - By Sarah Moore, JamBase | The Attic [Published on: 10/22/08]
When Dalton’s voice naturally escapes a certain level, though, it can be as rough as a foghorn blast shattering a window. Not everyone will care for the effect but the power is undeniable. Nick Cave calls her his favorite female blues singer and he should know a sound that could rock the walls of Jericho. Indeed, when Bob Dylan made it to Greenwich Village in the 1960s, Karen Dalton’s was the voice that he felt stood out. It is not difficult to suspect that he heard in her the triumphantly imperfect tones of defiance and conviction that others have often heard in him.
Dalton has been compared a thousand times with Billie Holiday. That may be for the perception of physical beauty, the reality of heroin use, or the undeniably seductive world-weary weight that both project. That said, I doubt Holiday could match Dalton on either the 12-string or banjo and I find Dalton’s missing teeth pretty charming! Seriously, though, Dalton reminds me more of Tim Buckley or Vashti Bunyan. All three have pipes and phrasing that people either love or run a mile from. She also brings to mind the cult of Nico, in that people (especially men) will always look at her picture and mistakenly imagine that their love could have saved her from a cruel world, or from herself. The Band’s Richard Manuel is said to have written “Katie’s Been Gone” from The Basement Tapes about Dalton. If that sounds glamorous, then her death (in 1993) after dealing with the effects of HIV for at least eight years, is probably less so.
In the blizzard of reissues, re-masters and box set presentations, it can be hard for both cynics and innocents to know what to trust. Sometimes it seems like anyone who made a disc that sold negligibly more than 15 years ago is now a legend and anyone who sold even less is a cult. Obviously the reissue of Karen Dalton’s material is not a coincidence; it reflects the business recognition of a climate potentially favorable to certain sounds, for folk’s sake. Meanwhile, over on “her“MySpace page some Italian photographer suggests that she “keep in touch”. Sometimes, though, an accidental or timely invitation should be accepted with good grace. This is a fine reissue and re-master. Put any misgivings aside and check out Karen Dalton, here, on Cotton Eyed Joe, and In My Own Time.
Karen Dalton “Green Rocky Road”
This recording consists of some very rare and previously unreleased home recordings of Karen Dalton from 1962-1963. I cannot believe that this has never been released and that these tapes have just been lying around for so long. This should definitely be of interest to anyone who has delved into some of the recent reissues of her work. All of the takes are amazing in their intimate, simple beauty, and this is an absolutely gorgeous record.
The album’s rustic charm lies mainly in the recording setting and technique. As we are informed at the beginning of the first song “this was recorded to two tracks”. You hear the sounds of the room, the creaks of the chair and the ringing of the telephone, even the singing of birds outside as Ms. Dalton demonstrates her prowess on a number of instruments, mainly banjo and 12 string guitar in a relaxed home setting (something that was lacking in her studio recordings). And if that weren’t enough, her voice has an incredibly haunting beauty to it; the sort of velvety delicateness of Billy Holiday at her finest but with that inner strength and grit of the Carter Family. This is something that you must own if you are into more contemporary singer/songwriters such as Entrance or Ora Coogan or any of the aforementioned.
This is exactly the kind of thing I like to see issued (or reissued); those perfect moments caught on tape that would otherwise have become part of an entire lost generation of music that has thankfully been restored and released on more accessible formats. It is very easy to see how Dalton was hugely influential upon the likes of Bob Dylan, Fred Neil, and Davendra Banhart. This is going to be essential.
10/10 — Kevin Richards
Aquarius Records (SF): DALTON, KAREN Green Rocky Road | This is the one!! The beautiful, raw, and majestic lost Karen Dalton recordings we’ve all been waiting for. While we loved the recent release Cotton-Eyed Joe, it was mostly because we thought we’d never get to hear any other recordings, so we were happy with the below lo-fidelity and wavering performances (Dalton never liked performing live, so we don’t think those recordings showcased her best side). Then these recordings showed up and have blown the others away. Recorded in 1962 at home on two track tape, played mostly on solo banjo, Green Rocky Road captures Dalton at her most intimate and unearthly. Like some old dusty recordings of lost Appalachian folk, Dalton’s circular fingerpicking and warm wooly voice invokes a magical quality as she works through several interpretations of traditional folk songs including versions of “Katie Cruel”, “If I Had A Ribbon Bow”, and “In The Evening”, which were featured on her studio albums. Other songs not previously featured are the British Folk classic “Nottamun Town”, the ghostly “Little Margaret” and the famous cowboy song “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo”. There’s even a nice moment where you hear Dalton talking to her mother about going to dances. The quality of the recordings while still raw is so much greater in fidelity than Cotton Eyed-Joe, you’d think she was singing to herself in your home not realizing you were secretly standing behind her hanging on to every breath, praying that nothing breaks her transcendent spell. We can’t recommend this enough!!!
Dalton was the greatest female singer to come out of the early ‘60s folk revival and, except for her co-dependency with fellow junkie Fred Neil, was rarely known or heard - two albums were released during her lifetime, both ignored. Like Billie Holliday, with whom she’s often compared, her voice sounds like a prophecy for her future destruction, even early on. Perhaps, like a Borgesian narrator, the studier of the down-and-out becomes the studied. Desire is a form of magic, as well. Or at least it clouds the mind. As Dalton was essentially a folk singer (but better than that), this collection of early 60s demos sounds pretty much the way a regular album on Folkways would. The suffering in her voice is palpable, but was it real at the time? Like Jackson C. Frank, did she have to demolish herself to create herself? Not all magyk can be the white kind, even if the folk revival was.
Few people are as fully qualified to sing the blues as Karen Dalton. After a life wrecked with enough trouble, substance abuse, rotten luck and bitter disappointments to fuel an eternity of heartbreaking twelve-bar recitals, Dalton plummeted to eking out a miserable living on the streets of New York.
It wasn’t until a few years ago that people outside the secretive inner circles of folk-blues collectors become aware of this important forebear to the currently fertile avant-folk movement, thanks to long-overdue reissues of the studio-shy singer’s meagre output (1969’s wonderfully loose It’s So Hard to Tell Who’ll Love You Best and 1971’s Woodstock-recorded In My Own Time) and lavish praise from the esteemed likes of Bob Dylan, Nick Cave, Joanna Newsom and Devandra Banhart. By then, it was much too late for Dalton, who died dirt-poor and homeless in 1999.
A follow-up of sorts to the early 60’s solo live tapes unearthed last year as the excellent double album Cotton Eye Joe (both collections were recorded by early champion Joe Loop), these nine tracks capture Dalton in the relaxed settings of her Boulder, Colorado home in 1962. Although the dope, booze and crippling let-down from a non-starter of a musical career were yet to come, the all-encompassing sadness that was to become Dalton’s trademark is present on every note of the proceedings. Something of a countrified Billie Holliday, it’s likely that Dalton’s mournful, old-before-their-time pipes could have turned even the chirpiest of ditties into a low-down, tear-stained lament. Thanks to her fondness of the most downtrodden folk and blues tunes the vast archives of traditional US song can provide, though, we’ll never know, as the songs here offer plentiful misfortune, heartbreak and strange goings-on for Dalton’s inimitable vocal prowess – crackling like an old 78rpm record with a lung condition, but potent nonetheless – to latch onto.
You couldn’t get much further removed from a slickly professional studio setting – the phone rings in the background at one point, a few tunes take ages to get ignited, there’s some noticeable mistakes and Dalton occasionally seems more concerned with honing her formidable technique on banjo and twelve-string guitar than singing. For a laidback jam never intended for public consumption, though, this is pretty spectacular stuff. Katie Cruel, a miserable tune at the best of times, is transformed into a wrenching account of life on the rocks, whilst the titanic title track supports Dylan’s claim that Dalton was the best singer to emerge from the hootenanny-ing masses of the early 60’s folk boom. There’s sparkling loveliness (the tender Ribbon Bow), blues taken at a hypnotic snail’s pace (Leroy Carr’s In The Evening), as well as reminders that the American folk-blues archives contain some of the downright weirdest songs anyone’s ever gotten around to composing. One for the fans, maybe, but for anyone bitten by the Dalton bug this is as essential as it gets. ~ Janne Oinonen
Karen Dalton - “Green Rocky Road”
Recorded “on two tracks” (as Dalton plainly states) in 1962 and 1963, the material for Green Rocky Road came from the same trove of reel-to-reel tapes that gave birth to Cotton Eyed Joe last year. The main difference is that Cotton Eyed Joe was played for an audience in a tiny Colorado coffee house, while Green Rocky Road was laid down at home and mostly alone. So, while Cotton Eyed Joe was interspersed with the evidence of other people – applause, conversation, a certain communicativeness in the playing – this one seems almost wholly internal.
Dalton is still in her mid-20s here, not yet smoothed or styled by contact with Bleecker Street contemporaries like Fred Neil, not yet plagued by the addictions of her later years. She has not yet learned the sophisticated jazz-like phrasing of So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best, and her approach is plain-spoken, strong and solitary. You have only to contrast Green Rocky Road’s “Ribbon Bow” with the one she recorded for Capitol half a decade later to hear the difference. Here, “Ribbon Bow” is all her, the extraordinarily emotive voice, the steady thrum of 12-string. You feel, almost, as if you’re eavesdropping, so private and meditative is the song. By the time she comes back to “Ribbon Bow” in 1969, her voice has modulated, landing lightly on the notes, curving around them in blues-tinged flourishes. She no longer sounds like she is thinking aloud, but rather performing. It is as if, in the interim, she has gone from dreaming about “if I were like city girls” to becoming one.
You can’t imagine the later, more sophisticated Karen Dalton plunking out the cowboy song “Whoopee Ti Yi Yo” on her banjo, as she does here with obvious gusto. Nor can you picture a conversation like the one that opens “In the Evening” when Dalton asks some unnamed if they were allowed to dance in any part of Bleecker Street (many religious folks were not). These songs are rougher, harsher and more countrified than the work that made Dalton a favorite of the new folk generation, a reminder that however relevant she is now, she is very much a part of an earlier generation.
Yet, Dalton is also something of a lone figure, historically, one of a few women to play as equals alongside Neil and Ramblin’ Jack and Peter Walker; a misfit, an outsider, and an unmarried mother at a time when those things mattered. And that, really, is what Green Rocky Road conveys – the utter solitariness of a woman left to her music, sad and strong and more than a little lonely. The title track, sung in a sure, confident voice over a thicket of guitar and banjo, could be a field recording from a forgotten Appalachian village. It has none of the polish, but all of the infinite longing of Dalton’s later work.
You have to wonder what Dalton would have thought, if she were alive, about the release of these unfiltered songs, whether she would be embarrassed about them or proud. They’re sketches really, with strong lines and hardly any shading, a rough indication of what she would become. –By Jennifer Kelly
The Plain Truth About Karen Dalton: An Interview with Joe Loop
PopMatters, by Nate Cunningham
UNCUT Review in! Click image below to enlarge.
“…sounds less like a folk record and more like a warp in the space-time continuum, a portal that links prehistoric blues with the freakiest acoustic music being made today. It’s also the most beautiful and harrowing album you’ll hear this year.” -John Lewis Uncut 4 ****
“…revel in the presence of a great artist in her prime that Joe Loop felt when Dalton auditioned for him years ago.” -The Wire. Click to read the enlarged review.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008 HEXEDJOURNAL.COM | When the Sun Goes Down:: There are so many myths and misconceptions about Karen Dalton that it is easy to become absorbed in them instead of in her work. The mythology of Dalton ranges from the beautiful (plants stretching up and growing into her New York City windows), to the self-invented (although Dalton claimed half Cherokee heritage, according to her daughter, Karen didn’t have enough blood to collect benefits) to the classic rock end (contrary to popular, belief Dalton was neither alone nor homeless but in a friends apartment cared for by her son Lee, when she died of AIDS in 1993). The facts are plain: Karen married Ron Dalton, a college professor, had two children, divorced, and moved with her daughter to pursue her art in New York. Dalton was popular in the New York folk circuit of the 1960s but never tasted success, perhaps because of her strict adherence to standards, perhaps to her lack of stage savvy. Her daughter left Dalton and moved back with her father; Dalton’s son Lee eventually moved to stay with his mother in New York. Dalton developed a rough heroin habit, contracted AIDS and died in 1993, shortly before her albums were re-released. Sweeping aside the tragic, romantic notions of Dalton’s life allow one to fully listen to the her work.
While her studio albums, It’s Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You The Best and In My Own Time, are good there is an air of folly about them; Dalton didn’t enjoy the studio environment so recording her in one was like capturing nature by going out, killing and then stuffing a wild animal. Sure, that doe may look life like but it just isn’t the essence of a deer. The Karen Dalton captured in the nine tracks on Green Rocky Road is not the Karen Dalton tagged as “folk’s answer to Billie Holiday” or “the best singer you’ve never heard”. What is frozen on the two-track the songs were recorded on is much purer, simpler, less styled, and more self-aware than either of her studio album.
The recordings for Green Rocky Road (Delmore Recordings) come from Dalton’s friend, Joe Loop, who recorded some live sets of Dalton at his coffee house in Colorado, The Attic, in 1962. The recordings on Green Rocky Road start with the simple proclamation, “Recorded on two tracks,” and that is the ideal amount of introduction for Karen Dalton. As soon as she starts picking her banjo on the title track, Dalton’s voice fills the ears like honey flecked with shards of glass, making the words of each standard she sings swell with hope and then shatter with resignation. The banjo playing is straight out of Appalachia conjuring up thoughts of Jean Ritchie and The Carter Family, but also has a bit of blues influence. The songs are snapshot of Dalton at her most content; fresh escaped out of her past in Enid, Oklahoma but before she escaped too far into the New York folk scene, hard drugs, and buying into her own obscurity.
ARTHUR BEST OF 2007 LISTS No. 6: Michael Simmons
I’ve never much believed in the artificial man-made time blocks called ‘years’. As the late Skip Spence used to say, “I do not worship the Time God.” I’ve always been comfortable living in the past, present, and future simultaneously, killing time with the earthly as well as the departed. Karen Dalton, my favorite singer of 2007, has been dead for almost 15 years. This past year saw the first release of early live sets of Karen’s called Cotton Eyed Joe: The Loop Tapes/Live In Denver 1962 (Delmore Recordings). Two CDs and a short DVD from 1969-70 shot by a French film crew. Sweet Mother K.D., as her friend Freddy Neil dubbed her, was too real for the shopping mauled world of 20th Century America. She must’ve seen the 21st Century coming, cuz she checked out in time to miss it completely. (You ain’t missin’ nothin’, baby.) Her voice was an exposed nerve wrapped in a fragile rose. Reminiscent of Billie Holliday, another fragile flower, Karen sings eternal standards some call folk music on Cotton Eyed Joe. From Woody (”Pastures of Plenty”) to Bascom Lamar Lunsford (”Mole In The Ground”), from Freddy Neil (”Blues On The Ceiling”) to many songs written by Public Domain (the greatest songwriter ever!), she exudes more soul than a white person can rightfully claim. Soul is a lost value in 21st Century America, primarily because it ain’t for sale. One either has it or doesn’t. No singer with soul shows their pussy to the paparazzi. But the sexiest singers show their soul through song. So it is with Karen.
I owned her first two albums on vinyl back in the day: It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best and In My Own Time. The first was released in 1969, the second in 1971. Both have been re-issued on CD. Out of the blue in aught-seven comes these new/old recordings. Her voice doesn’t have the more urbane edge of the later records and that’s partly the charm. She is simply one of the greatest blues singers ever without belonging to any category. In the 1970s I had a band with Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders called The Wipe-Out Gang. Peter invited his friends to come sit in with us at gigs. I got to jam and record with Bill Barth and Luke Faust of the wonderful Insect Trust. I begged Peter to get his friend Karen to join us. He would ask her and she said she’d come down, but never did. “Missed it by that much!” as secret agent Maxwell Smart used to say. It’s now 35 years later. I’ve been having a lousy century thus far, but I’ve got these recordings by Karen Dalton and she keeps me company in a cold, cold world.
City Pages: Minneapolis/St. Paul | By Andy Beta, Nov. 21, 2007
“Cotton Eyed Joe” frequently soundtracks events both celebratory and soused, be it at Yankee Stadium (in its Rednex techno incarnation) or at a boot-scooting wedding in rural Texas (see Urban Cowboy’s spoke-line dance). The song’s a folk standard that predates the American Civil War, and it’s easy to miss its lyrical core of heartbreak and abandonment amid the dancing frenzy it now evokes. As rendered by star-crossed Greenwich Village folk goddess Karen Dalton, one is hard-pressed to even imagine such bacchanal. Instead, Dalton deploys a devastating stratagem that Cat Power would use nearly 40 years later on 2000’s The Covers Record: Take the overly familiar and sing it lonesome.
That Dalton made but two studio albums makes this archival find all the more bittersweet. Subtitled The Loop Tapes/Live in Boulder 1962, this weighty two-CD/one-DVD package captures Dalton early on, before her hard-living lifestyle mummified her. Young and sober, she still sounds ancient, her voice evoking both the human pain of Billie Holiday and the natural ruggedness of a billy goat. Fingerpicking both 12-string and banjo, she has a tone that’s deliberate yet chiming. She works her way through two sets of blues standards and tunes from Greenwich neighbor (and similarly troubled folk demi-god) Fred Neil. On work songs like “Everytime I Think of Freedom” or “Run Tell That Major,” her rhythm mimics that of a pick or shovel, sharp and flinty. One can easily picture Dalton coming in from the cotton fields—rather than strumming in a teeny folk club—hands calloused, singing when the sun goes down.
Kim Gordon’s Best of 2007 - “Karen Dalton, Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore) A beautifully transparent document recorded at the Attic in Boulder, Colorado, in 1962. I love Dalton’s vocals, guitar playing, and arrangements, but also being able to visualize the room, its small size and intimate feel. Listening is like being in someone’s house; maybe it’s cold and raining outside, but everyone there is enveloped by the space and the music.” Kim Gordon is an artist and founding member of the band Sonic Youth.
Nov. 11, 2007: A case can be made for Karen Dalton, the late Greenwich Village folkie sometimes referred to as the best singer nobody’s heard, as the archetype for current pop-cabaret stylists Norah Jones and Madeleine Peyroux, even Leslie Feist. Neo-psych sprites like Jolie Holland and Joanna Newsom certainly have embraced Dalton, who died in 1993 after struggling with alcohol, drugs and depression for much of her life.
In the two-disc set “Cotton Eyed Joe,” only the third album of her music ever released, Dalton accompanies herself on banjo and 12-string guitar at an intimate club in Boulder, Colo., in 1962. A year or so later she would move to New York, where she fell in with the heady likes of Bob Dylan, Fred Neil and the Holy Modal Rounders.
Dalton sings two of Neil’s compositions here: “Red Are the Flowers,” a wrenching lament for the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and “Blues on the Ceiling,” a devastating personification of despair. On the latter, amid a haunting exchange between voice and guitar, she cries, “Even cocaine couldn’t ease the pain/I’d be better off dead,” her ghostly whine as otherworldly as those of Delta blues singer Skip James and bluegrass patriarch Ralph Stanley.
The mood is narcotic throughout, with Dalton also using her uncluttered fingerpicking and keening phrasing to reimagine a pair of lesser known Ray Charles numbers to devastating effect. She invests Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty” with an equally mournful voice, her intonation, like Billie Holiday’s, as hornlike as it is human. - Bill Friskics-Warren
PitchforkMedia.com - Rating: 8.0
In 1962, Karen Dalton, her husband, and her daughter lived in a small shack in the Colorado mountains, with no electricity or running water, but a splendid view and plenty of space to ride horses. Occasionally, Dalton would play at the Attic, which at that time was the nucleus for Boulder’s folk scene. As Joe Loop, the club’s co-proprietor and a friend of Dalton’s proclaims, “Folk music was in the midst of its most popular period so when Karen performed there, [the audience] really listened. You can tell she was comfortable when you listen to the recordings.” To hear contemporaries and historians tell it, Dalton rarely settled anywhere for long, so for her to find a place where she felt musically at home seems important, at least in retrospect. Fortunately, Loop had the good sense to record some of Dalton’s shows at the Attic, and nearly a half-century later, Nashville-based Delmore Recordings is releasing it as Cotton Eyed Joe: The Loop Tapes - Live in Boulder - 1962, a 2xCD/1xDVD set that’s a boon for Dalton enthusiasts as well as those who discovered her from last year’s re-issue of In My Own Time.
Loop’s tapes are necessarily scratchy and lo-fi, the audio equivalent of a creased sepia-tone photograph. Occasionally, Dalton’s performance strains the capabilities of the recording devices, as on the jarring “Fannin’ Street”, but most of the songs make this technological drawback a defining aesthetic. The haunted “It’s Alright”, completely reinventing Ray Charles’ original, sounds like it’s echoing directly from 1962; likewise the dusty narrative “Old Hannah”, which foregoes the guitar, leaving only Dalton’s voice to fill the Attic space. “Prettiest Train” in particular is a lo-fi opus: Dalton’s hard strums and guitar slaps mix into a roughly percussive rhythm for her upbeat blues variation, and she hits the last syllable of each verse line with added force, as if she’s singing in italics– “Honey, don’t you marry no convict man!” Her consciously and regularly placed accents give the melody a slight rush against her guitar, creating an urgent calamity that sounds barely controlled and more intensely dire than anything else she ever did.
Loop is right: Dalton, in her mid-twenties at this time, does seem more comfortable in this setting than on either of her two studio albums. Or, more to the point, she sounds more powerful on these songs, recorded seven years before her proper debut, It’s Always Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best. Reportedly, Dalton hated recording — she had to be tricked into recording that debut — but the stage is obviously her milieu, especially in an intimate room filled with attentive listeners. There can’t be more than a dozen people in the audience, hardly enough to call it a crowd, but they respond to these songs, not just in their clapping but in their silence. Dalton feeds off this dynamic, drawing sharp and confident lines through these old songs. She slows “Cotton Eyed Joe” to a crawl and sings it as a folk pastoral, then switches from guitar to banjo (reportedly carved from a bedpost) on “One May Morning” and the curious “Mole in the Ground”.
When Dalton speaks (and she barely does), her voice sounds grandmotherly: worn around the edges by hard times and desperation. At times she sings these songs like she’s covering herself with a quilt; other times she’s in the wood howling in the cold. Along with her ready access to such extremes, the qualities she conveys through these songs — the self-reliance and sense of personal freedom so valued by her folk contemporaries, as well as her almost desperate disregard for commercial prospects — are the very same ones that both attract cratediggers and ensure her larger obscurity. Forty-five years after these recordings, Dalton remains one of folk’s most fascinating footnotes. Site >> -Stephen M. Deusner, December 07, 2007
The Montreal Gazette 1/31/08
KAREN DALTON . Cotton Eyed Joe . Delmore/Universal
Back in the early-1960s, no one sang the blues quite like Karen Dalton, a hypnotic singer who influenced the likes of Bob Dylan and Fred Neil. You could literally feel the pain and suffering in every line she sang. Notoriously studio-shy, Dalton only recorded two LPs before her career was lost to substance abuse. But now there’s also this previously unreleased 2-CD live set, recorded solo in a Colorado club in 1962. The recording quality, like Dalton’s talent, is raw, but her mesmerizing versions of blues, R&B and folk songs are unforgettable. Listening to this performance is a demanding experience; this isn’’t an easy-to-listen-to entertainment. But it’s the kind of revelatory window into the human condition that is all too rare in music. **** Podworthy: Katie Cruel
- Mike Regenstreif
In Her Own Time
The return of Karen Dalton
BY JIM CALIGIURI
Photo by Elliot Landy, www.landyvision.com
“My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton,” writes Bob Dylan on p.12 of Chronicles: Volume One. “She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky, and sultry. I’d actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.”
Besides a possible early-1960s love interest of Dylan, Karen who?
“All of us in the Bad Seeds were huge Karen Dalton fans,” says Nick Cave in the liner notes to the 2006 reissue of Dalton’s second and last album, 1971’s In My Own Time. “We had this friend, Mick Geyer, his life’s adventure was to seek out art and music in life that was wonderful. Part of his job was to open our minds to things, and we met him in the punk rock days when we were ready to chuck everything out the window. He liked a lot of jazz music, and different things, and he was always very much like, ‘Yeah, get rid of that, but don’t get rid of this, listen to this, listen to this.’
It’s Not So Hard to Tell Who Loves Karen Dalton: (l-r) Bob Dylan, Dalton, and Fred Neil at the Cafe Wha? in 1961. Photo by Fred W. McDarrah
“Karen Dalton was one of those people.”
Along with In My Own Time’s shamanistic introduction from Patti Smith guitarist and music scholar Lenny Kaye – and a “poem” from Devendra Banhart – that’s giddy praise for a woman who didn’t perform after the mid-1970s and died of AIDS in 1993.
Dalton’s voice has that effect on people.
“She sure can sing the shit out of the blues,” is how folk godfather Fred Neil put it.
Dalton in Paris. Photo by Dan Hankin
A forlorn cry from the abyss, she doesn’t have to dig deep for the blues. The blues are Karen Dalton. She makes other singers sound like frauds.
“She understood the blues better than the folk singing milieu she was hanging out with,” furthers Cave. “Absolutely. She’s a blues singer to me. It’s full of idiosyncrasies that you can’t repeat – it’s in her voice and it’s just extraordinary. She is my absolute favorite blues singer – female blues singer, let’s say.”
Let’s. Following Seattle indie Light in the Attic’s deluxe treatment of In My Own Time (”Reissues,” Dec. 15, 2006) came Delmore Recordings’ 2-CD live set, Cotton Eyed Joe (”Reissues, Dec. 14, 2007), previously unheard hauntings from her residence in Boulder, Colo., in 1962. Dalton’s 1969 debut, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, completes the triumvirate of her recorded output thus far. That’s the easy part. Digging for the story of Karen Dalton’s life, by contrast, takes on the specter of chasing ghosts.
The original bio for In My Own Time notes a passport that “says she’s from Texas,” but better sources claim Dalton was originally from Enid, Okla., her mother full-blooded Cherokee. She turned up in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, at the height of the folk revival, with her 12-string Gibson guitar, a long-neck banjo, and her otherworldly vocals. She immediately drew attention from the aforementioned folksinging milieu. Around the same time, she could also be found in Boulder.
Tim Hardin in Colorado with Dalton and Susie Bergman. Photo by Dan Hankin.
“A nice little cow town with a university,” says Joe Loop of Boulder back then. Loop operated the Attic, a homey coffeehouse where he occasionally ran tape on the proceedings. Cotton Eyed Joe comes from his personal collection. “In 1961, the folk thing was starting to happen, blossoming on the two coasts. People would come through looking for gas money, and some of them stuck around. Most of the people who played at the Attic were from the University of Colorado, but Karen was an experienced performer and had her stuff together.
“It’s amazing how many musicians would go out of their way to play with her back then. She played with all the best people: Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Dino Valenti. All those people loved her and loved playing with her, but it wasn’t the kind of stuff that the record labels were looking for.”
A combination of stage fright, drug and alcohol problems, and the fact that Dalton didn’t write her own material didn’t help. She also had difficulty in the studio, all but hoodwinked into recording her first album. Producer Nik Venet had tried unsuccessfully to record Dalton, so he invited her to a Fred Neil session and asked her to cut Neil’s “Little Bit of Rain” for his own private archives. She cut the entire album that night, most of the tracks in one take.
Covering the breadth of her character, Dalton’s Capitol Records rollout includes tunes from Neil, Hardin, Jelly Roll Morton, and Eddie Floyd & Booker T. Jones. While not a commercial success at the time of its release, It’s So Hard had been reissued twice in the past decade, by Koch in 1997 and the French Megaphone label in 2006.
Photo courtesy of Light In The Attic
The Holy Modal Rounders’ folk subversive, Peter Stampfel, who played with Dalton, seems to capture her essence perfectly in the liners to the Koch reissue when he writes: “She was the only folk singer I ever met with an authentic ‘folk’ background. She came to the folk music scene under her own steam, as opposed to being ‘discovered’ and introduced to it by people already involved in it.”
Today, by phone, Stampfel recalls Dalton with a resigned bluntness.
“We hung together from 1969 to the mid-Seventies, performing rarely. We’d take amphetamines and rehearse a lot. That band played maybe three gigs. She used to shoot amphetamines. Then, like a lot of people when they get older, she turned into an alcoholic.”
Stampfel remembers that Dalton had been in the hospital just before In My Own Time, recorded in Woodstock, N.Y., with Electric Flag bassist and Dylan/Miles Davis sideman Harvey Brooks directing a select group of sessionistas. Dalton tackles Motown classic “How Sweet It Is (to Be Loved by You)” and “In a Station” by the Band’s Richard Manuel, and while the album’s full production is disorienting, it recalls the early work of one of Dalton’s contemporaries, Bonnie Raitt: commercial, bluesy, singer-songwriter-friendly. Dalton’s ragged vocals commanding the orchestrated surroundings are singular if nothing else, and all agree that the stark reading of the traditional “Katie Cruel” is haunted beyond words.
Photo by Elliot Landy, www.landyvision.com
Woodstock Festival co-promoter Michael Lang put out In My Own Time on his Just Sunshine imprint and then arranged for Dalton and band to tour Europe as the unlikely opening act for Santana. During the trek, they played Montreux, and she never made it out of the dressing room. Acoustic guitarist Dan Hankin, who backed Dalton from 1965 into the early 1970s and appears on both studio albums, remembers the ups and downs all too well.
“She was just falling prey to her own demons and drug abuse,” he says from his home in Colorado. “Before we went on this European trip, she bought me a guitar. After that trip, she went back to Woodstock and was trying to get another band together. She invited me to join her, and after several weeks with nothing happening, I started saying, ‘When are we gonna rehearse?’ I had to leave because I had a life elsewhere, but she didn’t want me to leave.
“After I got back, she called me up in the middle of the night and demanded that I send her the guitar back. I sent it back and never spoke to her again.”
Hankin can be seen in the DVD that accompanies Cotton Eyed Joe as well as the French release of It’s So Hard. Only four songs and less than 15 minutes long, it captures Dalton onstage in New York and in the Colorado mountains circa 1969-1970. It’s a thrill to see her perform, missing a couple of teeth, and with waist-length brown hair and the shadow of a smile, Dylan’s description of her as sultry is more than apt.
Karen Dalton discography … so far
“She was living in the mountains outside of Boulder,” explains Hankin, “in a little old mining cabin without running water and an outhouse. I sort of inherited that cabin when she left. It was only $30 a month. The scene I was in with Karen was very low-key. It was people who weren’t in the mainstream of society. We mostly played in living rooms or in tiny little bars for drinks.”
Until three years ago, few besides Joe Loop even knew that the footage from a French film crew following Dalton at the time even existed. Nick Cave has Joe Loop to thank for even more: He sold his entire collection of Dalton tapes to the Megaphone label, which is planning another release later this year. There’s more Dalton than live Attic recordings, too.
“Other stuff was recorded at someone’s house,” reveals Loop. “One was from 1963. They’re just personal recordings, some string-band-type stuff. What’s going to be released next is where she accompanies herself on banjo.”
Though Dalton disappeared from the public eye soon after her sophomore release, it’s a fair guess that she continued to play in living rooms, out of the spotlight. While Lenny Kaye describes Dalton’s last days as “living on the New York streets, destitute, her health gone,” Peter Walker sets the record straight.
“Let me put to rest these ideas that she died in destitute poverty and drug addicted homelessness,” he states. “She was perfectly functional mentally. She was living in Hurley, in upstate New York between Kingston and Woodstock. She lived with AIDS for more than eight years, but with an excellent quality of life considering the disease.”
A guitarist of some renown in the 1960s of the Cambridge, Mass., scene, Walker once directed music for Timothy Leary’s infamous “celebrations,” in which the guru would rant to acid-drenched audiences of thousands. He met Dalton early in the decade and remained friends with her until her death.
“Karen was part of the crowd that hung around with Tim Hardin,” he recalls. “They all loved her because she was the cover girl for the Ode Banjo company, the most traditional of instruments available only through mail order.”
Walker spent time with Dalton in the 1980s when she had an apartment in the Bronx and he worked in New York City. He became her caretaker later, offering her a place to live when the disease had nearly won. He maintains he has her diaries but admits that a box of tapes she left behind was destroyed in a fire.
Delmore Recordings’ Mark Linn, who guided Cotton Eyed Joe onto the market and played an enormous role in this story, ultimately delivered the most poignant reflection on Dalton.
“There’s a small amount of people that have the original records [who] were intensely affected by them – by her voice,” he offers. “I think you can really feel the pain. She lived a hard musician’s life. It wasn’t about trendiness or stardom. It was about playing music.
“She wasn’t really made for her time.”
Karen Dalton: Cotton Eyed Joe | Delmore: 2CDs, 1 DVD
By JEFF TAMARKIN, February 5, 2008
The very definition of cult heroine, Karen Dalton’s sparse, often ghostly acoustic folk songs, skillful 12-string and banjo, and tortured phrasing — think Cowboy Junkies meet Billie Holiday — have, in the 45 years since these performances were taped at a Boulder coffee house run by one Joe Loop, attracted worshipers from Dylan to Devendra. That she died strung out, broke, and largely forgotten in 1993, having left behind only two albums recorded in 1969 and ’71, has only added to her posthumous mystique. Dalton’s voice, even at this 1962 stage, often sounded pained — not just another early-’60s Joan Baez wanna-be, she had more in common with the grizzled blues divas of decades gone by. Yet despite the lo-fi quality of these two discs, there is a luster and a palpable soulfulness to the stark renditions of songs from Fred Neil, Ray Charles, and old-faithful Trad. With some songs stripped down to near-dirge, bare-boned skeletons and others pumped up hootenanny style, then taken to some other place altogether, Dalton pours herself so fully into each tune, it’s no wonder she flamed out. A bonus four-track DVD offers rare footage of her performing several years later.
Folk singer Karen Dalton resurfaces on newly unearthed live recordings
BY BILL FRISKICS-WARREN • STAFF WRITER • JANUARY 13, 2008
Mystery shadows Karen Dalton, the gifted singer and banjo player who once was a fixture on the early ’60s Greenwich Village folk scene, with fledgling troubadours like Bob Dylan and Fred Neil.
Only a handful of photos of Dalton from that heady era remain in circulation, with even fewer notices from the New York press. She would go on to record a pair of studio albums, but neither reached much of an audience until they were reissued in the wake of her death, after a lifelong struggle with drugs, alcohol and poor mental health, in 1993.
Lately, though, neo-psychedelic sprites like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom have been claiming Dalton as one of their own. Her singular mix of blues, folk and jazz can even be heard in the intonation and phrasing of neo-cabaret singers ranging from Madeleine Peyroux to Feist.
It might not qualify as a full-blown revival, but with the release of Cotton Eyed Joe, two albums of newly unearthed live recordings, Dalton’s music is as much a part of the cultural zeitgeist as it’s been since Dylan sat in with her at Cafe Wha? in ‘61.
“She was there in the Village,” said Mark Linn, whose Nashville-based archival label, Delmore Recordings, has just issued Cotton Eyed Joe, an exquisitely unvarnished set that captures Dalton onstage at the Attic, an intimate campus coffeehouse in Boulder, Colo., in 1962.
“It’s just a mystery how she was passed up when all those other folkies were getting signed,” Linn added.
Dalton wouldn’t get around to making her debut album, a blues-steeped set for Capitol called It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, until 1969. By then critics and the record-buying public had moved on to singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and Carole King.
The Blues As Lived
Clocking in at just under 80 minutes, Cotton Eyed Joe doubles the amount of Dalton’s music that is available on disc. Just as crucial, it offers a rare glimpse of her performing live, accompanying her alternately keening and husky vocals on banjo or 12-string guitar.
The music is mesmerizing throughout, but maybe nowhere so much as in her haunting rendition of “It’s All Right,” one of a pair of lesser-known Ray Charles numbers that she re-imagines to overwhelming emotional effect.
“She added some beautiful harmonies in her very spacious guitar playing, punctuating with discordant notes while her plaintive vocal tells of sorrow, forgiveness and hope,” observed Joe Loop, the man who recorded the session at the Attic in 1962. “The song is a prime example of her ability to make an arrangement of a song that is very different yet captures and enhances the message and feeling of the original.”
Cutting just as close to the bone is Dalton’s ravaged take of “Blues on the Ceiling,” Fred Neil’s now-immortal personification of despair.
“Even cocaine couldn’t ease the pain/I’d be better off dead,” Dalton sings, her ghostly wail as otherworldly as that of Delta blues singer Skip James.
“It’s a voice that if you take the time to listen deeply, it’ll change your life,” said Linn, who admits that he’s gone from being a fan of Dalton’s music to becoming obsessed with it.
“Some people invent themselves as blues singers, but she’s pretty intensely real, for better or worse,” he added, alluding to the chronic mental health problems that she medicated with liquor and drugs.
A big difference between Dalton and many of the college-bred peers, Linn went on to say, was that she sang the blues as lived rather than imagined. Half Cherokee and half Irish, she arrived in New York with a sound that was fully formed and steeped in her hardscrabble Oklahoma upbringing.
“She wasn’t an Ivy League rich kid,” Linn said. “She grew up poor and learned many of her songs from her grandmother. What you hear is very much Karen Dalton’s world, not someone else’s.”
Bill Friskics-Warren writes about music and pop culture for The Tennessean. bfriskicswarren@tennessean.com
DustedMagazine.com
Oct. 25, 2007
Karen Dalton’s story has been told often enough that you need only type her name into a search engine to get the whole story, so here are the bare outlines. She came to New York City at the onset of the ’60s folk revival, where she wowed the likes of Bob Dylan and Fred Neil. The blues in her voice were as deep and dark as the Mariana Trench, and its pain-wracked crack earned her plenty of comparisons (which she reportedly detested) to Billie Holiday. Unfortunately, she also shared Holiday’s taste for self-obliteration, which in combination with a strong distaste for performing in contrived circumstances (like, you know, on stage or in the studio rather than in a living room) made her career a non-starter and contributed to her early demise in 1993.
This nicely packaged two-CD, one-DVD collection is just the third Dalton release, and the first to capture her on her own in front of an audience. Producer Nik Venet had to literally trick her into making her first LP by inviting her to sing at a Fred Neil session and rolling tape, and her second was an anomalous attempt at slick pop. So Cotton Eyed Joe is as close to undiluted Dalton as you’re likely to get… which makes its flaws worth overlooking.
The album was mostly recorded in concert at the Attic, a 50-seat basement folk club in Boulder, where Dalton earned her crust during a mountain sojourn in 1962; a more few tracks were done on the club owner’s tape machine when the audience wasn’t around. The recording quality is a bit dodgy despite an Abbey Road mastering job; a voice as big as Dalton’s needs a better microphone than whatever was on hand, and there’s a bit of tape hiss, although it’s not too overbearing.
But audiophile concerns aside, this is a pretty important document. It captures the Dalton that knocked out Greenwich Village with her musical conception already complete. She accompanies herself quite ably on a 12-string guitar (whose tone was as big, and occasionally as distorted, as her voice) and stark, sadly under-featured banjo. The material is partly Folk 101 stuff — “Mole in the Ground,” Leadbelly’s “Good Morning Blues.” But her version of the chestnut “Darlin’ Corey” has a wide-open, anthemic quality that is miles away from bluegrass’s head-down, throttle-open performance conventions.
Other tunes clue you to Dalton’s broader interests, which strayed well outside the folk canon. The set opens with a desolate cover of Ray Charles’ “It’s Alright” that defies you to say its name without crying. There are also a couple songs by the still-unknown Neil. His anti-nuke lament “Red Are The Flowers” is so earnest that in the wrong hands it could induce Bluto Blutarsky-like guitar demolition, but Dalton nails it by underplaying its pathos. That same quality makes the traditional tune “No More Taters” believable; by not trying too hard with her voice but strumming her guitar good and hard, she conveyed the impression that she grew up around people who really said ‘taters’ (which the Oklahoma-born half-Cherokee probably did) and that she knew the song’s sexual frustration first-hand (which this writer could not confirm). Unlike the sweater-clad dudes that took “Tom Dooley” up the charts, Dalton made music that still feels lived, not learned, and unconfined by received notions of what folk music was or should be.
Note: A word about the DVD - it’s only available in the US, and it is an NTSC version of one already sold with a French reissue of Dalton’s first album. -By Bill Meyer
Fader Magazine: Freak Scene #15
Karen Dalton sang the blues better than any white person before or since. Adored by everyone from Bob Dylan to Nick Cave, Dalton’s pathos was so profound that a new generation of fans have discovered her two late ’60s LPs and adopted them as their own, much like the sudden cult of Nick Drake. Also like Drake, Dalton sang the blues but unlike his gentle malaise, she belted it out with an astounding conviction. And now, almost similar to Drake’s home-recorded Tanworth in Arden 67/68 recordings, fans of Dalton now have their own holy grail of lo-fi, intimate recordings with Cotton Eyed Joe, featuring live recordings from a 1962 Boulder, Colorado folk club. Here Dalton runs through her own takes on Ray Charles, Woody Guthrie, even Jelly Roll Morton among others to remarkable effect. These recordings show Dalton’s voice to be room-shakingly heavy. All tracks are performed with either a 12-string guitar or banjo, both Dalton utilized with equal skill. This two CD set comes with fantastic liner notes from Joe Loop who recorded the tapes and a handsome package courtesy of the Delmore Recordings label. Maybe Dalton never really got her just due because she never wrote original material but in my mind the world just wasn’t ready for such a severe dose of heartache. Maybe its still not but with the rediscovery of everyone from Vashti Bunyon to Linda Perhacs, Dalton is perhaps the finest we’ll find. Here’s hoping more Dalton tapes emerge someday.
TOP 10 Year in Music - Grievous angel: Possessions, obsessions made visible
BY MAX GOLDBERG, Dec. 12, 2007
An archival recording can assume many forms, contexts, meanings. This year saw the reissue of an album unappreciated in its time (Jim Ford’s The Sounds of Our Time [Bear Family]), the compilation of genre-bound obscurities (Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul series), the live performance (Gram Parsons Archive, Vol. 1 [Amoeba]), the stripped acoustic set (Neil Young’s Live at Massey Hall 1971 [Reprise]), the radio sessions (Judee Sill’s Live in London: The BBC Recordings 1972–1973 [Water]), the reconstructed unfinished work (John Phillips’s Jack of Diamonds [Varese Sarabande]), the singles collection (Vashti Bunyan’s Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind: Singles and Demos 1964–1967 [FatCat/Dicristina]), and, perhaps closest to the bone, the fabled home recording.
Of course, some vocalists bend these categories by the nature of their performance style. This is certainly the case with Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore), a double CD documenting a lovely set by Karen Dalton at a Colorado coffeehouse in 1962. It might as well be a home recording for the intimacy of the performance space — owner Joe Loop explains in the liner notes that his club held only 50 — and the entrancing, private nature of Dalton’s folk arrangements. Such a record is notable for a performer as studio-phobic as Dalton: she only recorded two albums in her lifetime (1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best [Koch] and 1971’s In My Own Time [Light in the Attic]), and rumor has it the takes for her debut were captured on the sly, when she didn’t know the tape was rolling.
All of this would be mere intrigue if it weren’t for the fact that Dalton was one of the major talents of the first folk revival, though mostly unappreciated in her own time. She died in 1993 after a bitter struggle with drugs and alcohol. Cotton Eyed Joe is educational in contextualizing this mystery voice in terms of the coffeehouse circuit, but any such historiography quickly fades when faced with her strange, time-stopping interpretations of traditionals and tunes by the likes of Ray Charles, Woody Guthrie, and Fred Neil. The voice shakes with unresolve, surrounding you and then disappearing before you can pin it down, buckling with some unknowable duress, slipping into untold dimensions.
It only takes a few bars of Dalton’s possession of Charles’s “It’s Alright” to cast the spell. Her minimal 12-string guitar work drags on the tune, her voice searching the depths of the verse for a smoldering, emotional core. Elsewhere Dalton runs through the songs she would record for her studio albums, and it’s bracing to think how long she lived with these ballads. Forty-five years later, we hear a unique act of disembodiment, a self-eulogizing worthy of critic Greil Marcus’s illustrious … “Invisible Republic.”
Each glimpse deepens the appeal of so many other performers from that era, and it’s tempting to see these collections as filling a specific niche in today’s music market: a hunger for mystery, substance, and story in the face of a downloader’s paradise. As more music is rendered instantly accessible, many of us wish to burrow further into the secret histories of rock, folk, and soul. We sift for treasure, perhaps wondering if the Internet isn’t inherently anathematic to the idea of discovering forgotten greatness. Such recoveries can and will proliferate online, but ground must first be broken elsewhere — in a magazine or a basement, among audio tapes or old notebooks. Performers and promoters are becoming increasingly canny in using the Web to deliver icons and bylines, but it takes a set like Cotton Eyed Joe to make the singer a saint.
Unburied Treasure
A folkie’s revival continues with a set of previously unreleased recordings.
By Justin F. Farrar , Published: November 14, 2007
Karen Dalton and her guitar strike a pensive mood. Since her death in 1993, Karen Dalton’s fan base has grown faster than a Colorado mountain town. And fans can thank a retired builder from Indiana named Joe Loop for a new batch of previously unheard recordings, Cotton Eyed Joe — a collection of songs Dalton made in the early ’60s.
Back in 1961, Loop was just another Midwest bohemian who read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, dropped out of school, and headed west. He eventually settled in Boulder, Colorado, where he stumbled into owning the Attic, a tiny club serving as a key stop on America’s rapidly expanding folk-music circuit.
In an intimate setting that sat no more than 50, Loop booked many of the scene’s top folkies — including a pre-Byrds David Crosby, the Holy Modal Rounders, and John Phillips (several years before he formed the Mamas & the Papas). But it was Dalton, a young beauty with long black hair and Irish-Cherokee blood coursing through her veins, who really caught Loop’s ear and eye. He brought a portable reel-to-reel to the Attic soon after Dalton’s 1962 audition and started recording his new friend’s performances. Those songs make up Cotton Eyed Joe.
“The early folk-music crowd was a pretty straight bunch and clean-cut,” recalls Loop. “That wasn’t Karen at all. She didn’t get noticed by that in-crowd scene, although there were a lot of musicians who liked her.”
Indeed. Bob Dylan adored her, as did folk-rock architect Fred Neil, whose deep, phantom croon was informed by Dalton’s. And as rock and roll legend has it, the Band’s “Katie’s Been Gone,” a classic Basement Tapes track, was written in her honor. Yet Dalton — who split time between Boulder, Woodstock, and New York City, like many other wandering folkies back in the day — never achieved mainstream recognition in her lifetime. But like many great blues singers, Dalton exuded dark romance, spiritual mystery, and brooding emotion. “It’s cliché to say, but she had real soul,” says Loop.
There are several reasons why Dalton never became one of folk’s poster children. For one, unlike many of her contemporaries, Dalton lacked business savvy. Also, she made just two studio albums: 1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best and 1971’s In My Own Time, a knotted chunk of rural soul that stands alongside such singer-songwriter landmarks as Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and Neil Young’s Harvest.
“Performing was a weak spot for her,” says Loop. “The Attic was different, because it was a small place and she was comfortable there. But there was something about a gig. She just had trouble facing that.”
Loop and Dalton kept in touch — even when the fragile singer suffered through commercial failures and devastating addictions to hard drugs and alcohol. Loop remained one of her biggest fans and most loyal friends. He constantly tried to turn others on to Dalton’s music. But few shared his obsession.
Through the decades, Loop brooded over those old reels he made at the Attic (which closed in 1963), frequently playing them in private, because no one else ever cared to listen. “I knew it was good stuff, but what do you do with it?” he says. “There wasn’t anything to do with those tapes for the longest time.”
Until now. Popular taste has apparently caught up with the enigmatic Dalton. Deluxe CD reissues of her two LPs have precipitated a deluge of critical gush. Indie hipsters Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom and all their freak-folk followers treat Dalton like a patron saint.
When the French imprint Megaphone was preparing its rerelease of Dalton’s debut last year, the label tracked down Loop for archival photographs. Not only did he hook Megaphone up with a wealth of never-before-seen photos; he unleashed those old Attic recordings, which few Dalton experts even knew existed.
And Cotton Eyed Joe sounds great — especially coming from an amateur recorder who was working with early ’60s gear. More important, however, the two-disc set captures a side of Dalton that her original releases never could. “On her first record, she’s making room for the other players,” says Loop. “But on Cotton Eyed Joe, she doesn’t have to wait for anybody. She’s free to bring in all the subtleties in her timing and playing. This disc shows what she can do by herself.”
Like blues maverick John Lee Hooker, Dalton’s pained cry follows such a deeply individualized sense of rhythm and melody that it blossoms during solo performances. The songs heave and lunge like ocean waves breaking upon a rock-strewn beach. The same can be said of her guitar and banjo picking — both of which are downright virtuosic. “On ‘Fannin’ Street’ her guitar sounds like an orchestra,” says Loop. “It’s hard to believe one person is doing all that.”
But because Cotton Eyed Joe is such a personal statement, it’s a far more challenging listen than It’s So Hard to Tell and In My Own Time. “It’s not a very good introductory CD,” admits Loop. “But on the other hand, people who have already heard Karen will really like it. If people take the time to listen, I don’t know how they could not like her.”
Coincident reissues, both two-CD sets, expand the sparse catalogue of two distinctive ‘60s female voices who became early inspirations for Devendra Banhart. Cotton-Eyed Joe documents Karen Dalton’s 1962 run of shows at the Attic in Boulder, Colo. Dalton is mesmerizing here, rougher and more fragile than on later recordings, her low, desperate voice swinging out wide over the sustained notes and barely breathing the softer ones. Vashti Bunyan’s Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind is lighter and more pop, gathering Bunyan’s pre-Diamond Day recordings. The title track is Bunyan’s first single, massively orchestrated by starmaker Andrew Loog Oldham, its echoing drumbeat and wall of sound arrangements making an uneasy space for Bunyan’s water-pure voice. Bunyan has long maintained that she is a pop singer, not a folk artist, and here is uncontestable proof.
Yet both Dalton and Bunyan’s work hint at profound struggle against a 1960s world not receptive to strong, eccentric female work. The sadness, whether in Dalton’s aching rendition of “Cotton-Eyed Joe” or Bunyan’s lonely, lovely “Wishwanderer,” is unmistakable and heartbreaking. - By Jennifer Kelly, First printed in December 2007
ALL MUSIC GUIDE
Tall, beautiful, and haunted by hard drugs and alcohol, a situation that left her homeless and nearly toothless at her death in New York in 1993, Karen Dalton never found commercial success in her lifetime, but her extremely small recording legacy (just two albums, 1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best and 1971’s In My Own Time, and now this double-disc live set from 1962) reveals a maverick and singular musician utterly unlike anyone else on the folk (or any other) scene. Possessing an eerie, riveting voice and vocal style that could almost be called harrowing if it didn’t carry so much of the real world in its emotional depths, Dalton’s folk-blues repertoire consisted of odd bits of traditional fare (which she generally took in directions only she could have imagined), an assortment of Fred Neil songs (the artist she most resembles emotionally), Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” (Dalton’s vocal phrasing has recalled Holiday’s for many listeners), and assorted R&B songs, often those made famous by Ray Charles, which she stripped down and took into startling new places. Accompanying herself on a Gibson 12-string acoustic guitar or her trademark long-neck banjo, Dalton performed live sets that were tense, draining affairs, leaving little doubt that this was a woman who sang from a place few others had ever even glimpsed. This remarkable live set was taped in October of 1962 at the Attic coffeehouse in Boulder, CO, by Joe Loop, and it unveils as a stilled and stark reading of Dalton’s musical story, offering her eerie and moody version of Ray Charles’ “It’s Alright,” an absolutely haunting take on the old fiddle tune “Cotton Eyed Joe,” a real-as-it-gets rendition of Fred Neil’s “Blues on the Ceiling,” and a stunning run-through of the traditional (and for all practical purposes, Dalton’s signature tune) “Katie Cruel,” all of it done with the unhurried pace of an intense all-night conversation. Dalton has said that one doesn’t sing songs, one speaks them, and that philosophy helps explain her idiosyncratic vocal style, which shifts lines into unexpected patterns, mimicking, in a way, the pace and flow of solo speech, although make no mistake, what Dalton does is singing, and singing done with a hushed urgency, and in a way, it is more like a free-flight jazz horn break on an old blues standard than anything else. Dalton’s approach isn’t for everyone, and this is far from an album to throw on at a party — the barely veiled emotional power of these vocal performances is much more likely to produce a stunned silence than any kind of levity. The really good news is that this two-disc package now doubles the amount of Karen Dalton recordings available in the world, and it adds an additional DVD with videos of Dalton singing “God Bless the Child,” “It Hurts Me Too,” Fred Neil’s “A Little Bit of Rain,” and the traditional “Blues Jumped the Rabbit” in New York in 1969 and Summerville in 1970. She was one of a kind, and the real tragedy is that people are only discovering that now some dozen years and more after her death. ~Steve Leggett, All Music Guide
Not forgotten: Karen Dalton in Boulder
By John Wenzel , The Denver Post
The list of stunning performances never caught on tape likely goes on for miles, spanning every genre and period of modern music.
Fortunately, one of the ones that didn’t get away will soon see CD release, thanks to renewed interest in folk singer Karen Dalton, an elusive figure of the 1960s folk revival.
A cult has sprung up around Dalton in recent years, with praise flowing from hipster neo-folkies Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, and modern rock/roots icons Nick Cave and Lucinda Williams. Each lauds Dalton’s uniquely haunting, bluesy voice, which hews closer to Billie Holliday than Bob Dylan.
“I don’t think it’s her story, or the production on her records that gets to people, but just her voice,” said Mark Linn, head of Delmore Recordings. “It’s an instrument unto itself.”
On Tuesday, Nashville-based Delmore will issue “Cotton Eyed Joe,” a double CD recorded at a 1962 Dalton concert at The Attic in Boulder.
Joe Loop, who engineered the set and ran the small coffeehouse across the street from the University of Colorado, said Dalton magnetized anyone in her presence, despite never recording her own material and often performing with only a banjo or 12-string guitar.
“She was just a really innovative musician. She sang folk songs like nobody else,” Loop, 68, said from his home in Bloomington, Ind. “Most of the stuff she made hers. It’s not too surprising to me that even before younger musicians noticed her, other musicians always loved playing with her.”
Those other musicians include folk-rock legends Bob Dylan and Fred Neil, friends of Dalton’s in the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s. Despite Dalton’s obvious talent and the respect of fellow troubadours, she only issued two recordings in her life: The accidental full- length “It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best” (1969) and “In My Own Time” (1971), her only proper studio album.
That makes Loop’s recording at the Attic even more special.
“It captures Karen in this raw, untouched state and makes you feel like you are in the room with her,” said Linn. “It’s like an archaeological find, unearthed, dusted off, with the bones still perfectly intact.”
The early ’60s were a fruitful time for folk music in Boulder. The town already had a reputation in New York and California as an ideal place to stop off while traveling. Performers like David Crosby, Michael Cooney, Judy Roderick and Michael Bloomfield played The Attic, many of them regularly. Harry Tuft of the Denver Folklore Center would supply them with guitars, strings and picks.
When Karen Dalton showed up hours before opening time one day, Joe Loop decided to humor her request for an audition. She pulled out her red Gibson 12-string and convinced him to give her a regular show, becoming a friend of Loop’s while she lived in a cabin outside Boulder with her daughter.
“I always tried to book some of our better draws on the weekends, and when Karen came she was obviously as good as any of them, or better. But her name appeal wasn’t all that great,” Loop said. “I got her in on weekends when I could, and all the festivals I could. There were enough people around that understood where she was musically, for sure.”
The people at Dalton’s 1962 performance may not have realized how lucky they were. But the release of “Cotton Eyed Joe,” spearheaded by French fan Stéphane Bismuth, could change that. A meticulous remastering at Abbey Road Studios has restored much of the reel-to-reel tape, and a DVD of rare footage helps communicate Dalton’s live presence.
“It’s something I knew for years that people ought to hear,” Loop said.
For Dalton, who died in 1993 at age 55 after many years of struggling with drugs, it’s both a fitting epitaph and an invitation to new life. -John Wenzel
Foxy Digitalis: 10/10
“Cotton Eyed Joe”
This is an absolutely gorgeous double-cd collection of songs recorded at the Attic in Boulder, Colorado in the nighttime, 1962. You can feel the atmosphere in the room – they’re hanging on every syllable Dalton utters, her breath is keeping the whole space together, transfixed on the songs as they emerge, fully formed and free…the songs here breathe so terribly honestly. She accompanies her dark, straight and fucking beautifully true voice with either 12-string acoustic or banjo, picking out the kind of melodies (especially on banjo picked super songs like “Mole in the Ground”) that make you ache to be there. Her legendary arrangements amaze time after time – Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty”, Ray Charles’ “It’s Alright”, they all sound utterly embedded in the singer’s life, her own experience – but whether or not the person of Dalton, her actual self, is in these songs or not is beside the point, because she brings their characters, tragedies, scope and joy straight into instant unfolding existence. She sees it happening, it’s happening to her – whatever, it’s there, right in front of your ears, she brings it to you. Greil Marcus on the difference between the songs and ballads of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music was this difference in self-absorption - that it was the song out of which the singer emerges, and the ballad into which they disappear. Now these tapes reveal a Dalton that is constantly emerging and disappearing – I mean, when she sings “It Hurts Me Too”, you’ve no fucking doubt that she’s in pain; she almost bleeds that song out. And yet she’s got no claim over the songs, her I is everywhere – she’s the mole in the ground, she’s Katie Cruel, and she’s Karen Dalton, doing it with that voice like a valley. She never resolves the paradox, and she keeps that mystery from which truth emerges, what Dylan was saying about the sheer weirdness of the old songs, how they’ll keep themselves. And she makes new songs sound as old or as timeless as the ones passed down through generations. She’s a folk singer. Or maybe just a singer. Absolutely essential. 10/10 -Joe Luna (September, 2007)
BY JIM CALIGIURI
Karen Dalton, Cotton Eyed Joe (Delmore)
When Greil Marcus wrote of “the old, weird America,” he was referring to the folk music of the 1920s and 1930s anthologized by Harry Smith. This 2-CD live recording of Karen Dalton transports you to a time both old and weird, except it’s during the peak of the folk revival of the 1960s. Dalton, who’s become a cult figure following her death in 1993, possessed a bluesy edge to her voice that led to Billie Holiday comparisons. The resemblance is most prominent on the second disc of Cotton Eyed Joe, where Dalton delves deep into her soul to create a sound that’s simultaneously forlorn and fascinating while accompanying herself on 12-string guitar and banjo. Taken from tapes recorded at long-forgotten Boulder, Colo., folk den the Attic in 1962, the set finds Dalton covering songs from Fred Neil, Ray Charles, Jelly Roll Morton, and Woody Gurthrie, as well as traditional folk tunes, but she makes each her own, spryly arranging them to her own unique vision and abilities. Cotton Eyed Joe will thrill those looking for a glimpse into that void where the old, weird America might still be found.
The Onion AV Club Review, Denver/Boulder. Click image to enlarge:
“It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best” reviews:
“An intimate, candlelit mood that’s simultaneously unbearably sad and life-affirming.” - Q
”Unique - literally.” - The Guardian
“This must be the great lost American folk album. Words like`classic’ and `genius’ are tossed about far too readily, in this instance, they don’t tell half the story.” - Evening Standard
#2 in UNCUT Reissues Of The Year (2006)
#1 in MOJO Reissue of the Month
“It’s easy to mythologise Greenwich Village in the early‘60s. Besides Bob Dylan, we imagine hundreds of brilliant, forgotten singers infested every coffee house. One suspects that even folk Valhalla had its fair share of talentless Chaucers… but then someone unearths a treasure like this. This album feels like a major archeological find, with Dalton at last the equal of her gilded contemporaries. 5/5.” - The Times
“It’s compelling stuff. Musically, it’s a cross between the third Velvet Underground album, Tim Buckley’s Morning Glory and some Harry Smith Field recording. Dalton died in 1993, but these otherworldly thirty minutes might just provide a lasting legacy.” - The Word
“Top 5 Reissues of 2006… the freak-folk crate-dig of the year… gorgeous… one of the year’s uncanny rock-history mysteries.” - SPIN
“One of the most understated (and overlooked) records in history.” - Record Collector
“9.0” - Pitchfork Media
“A.” - The A.V. Club / The Onion
“4 Stars… the year’s most welcome reissue.” - Ben Edmonds, Detroit Free Press
“…a long-buried folk gem.” - Filter
“4 1/2 Stars, a handsome tribute to a nearly forgotten but oh so necessary talent.” - All Music Guide
“Bone chillingly wonderful.” - The New York Times
“4 Stars…Top 15 Reissues of 2006.” - MOJO
“One of the most influential musicians of her time.” - BUST
“Transcendent…chilling.” - Paste
“A.” - Entertainment Weekly
“Genre-defying and utterly unique, Dalton was a dusky jewel.”- HARP
click image to enlarge
“Top 5 Reissues 2006.” - Gorilla vs Bear
“Brilliant.” - Now Toronto
“A release that will likely have you falling in love with the late Greenwich Village folk singer’s music — just as Bob Dylan, the Band (she supposedly inspired “Katie’s Been Gone”), Nick Cave, and Devendra Banhart have.” - San Francisco Bay Guardian
“Essential.” - Skyscraper
“Like Dylan before her, she made sense of the whole sprawling territory of American popular music: rock, folk, jazz, country, blues, cabaret, and whatever else she could wrap her voice around.” - Chicago Reader
“…will startle newcomers.” - Los Angeles Times
“…a voice that could make statues cry.” - SF Weekly
“4 Stars..” - Playboy
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NPR.org, SONG OF THE DAY
Ruminations on Bridges Burned and Backs Turned
November 15, 2006 · As a solo artist, Karen Dalton only recorded two albums (1969’s It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You the Best and 1971’s In My Own Time), and until recently, the latter remained primarily in the hands of a few obsessed vinyl collectors. Fortunately, some of those collectors include the likes of Devendra Banhart, who helped raise the late singer’s profile in interviews and contributes an essay to a lavish new reissue of In My Own Time. The disc doesn’t include any bonus music — a tortured soul with a lifelong drug and alcohol problem, Dalton was notoriously hesitant to record — but its very existence on CD is bonus enough. Click for full feature and to listen to “Katie Cruel.”
Also, a review by Tom Moon. Shadow Classics: Ordinary Songs Become Memorable Events