Karen Dalton – 1966
Delmore
It’s hard to imagine in 2012 what it might have been like hearing Karen Dalton without the weird filtering effect of history and the distance of time. A Greenwich village folkster, she was in the 1960s a friend to the famous rather than being famous herself — Dylan was among her noted admirers — and now that she’s getting recognition, contemporary audiences have come to know her as a lost voice that can only belong to the past.
Cotton Eyed Joe, 2007’s two-disc release of Dalton performing live in Boulder in 1962, evoked that feeling in abundance, and 1966 only reinforces the notion further. Briefer at fourteen tracks, it’s another from-behind-the-glass example of Dalton’s arresting, raw, trembling sound. Recorded impromptu in her cabin in Colorado while rehearsing for a gig with her husband, its kin is 2008’s Green Rocky Road, both being home recordings.
So, they’re not quite live. But they are specific to that time, and to that very unique place. And everything here — making 1966 an almost unbearably poignant listen — is both dampened and made more acute by that inaccessibility of place and time, made audible by the nature of its recording.
Dalton is supposed to have disliked studio recording, and you can hear it; she sounds more confident on 1966 than on official releases It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best (1969) and In My Own Time (1971). The slight reverb on her voice on these latter recordings feels like it’s been added out of a misplaced sense of duty to studio tradition, and has the rather unfortunate effect of downplaying the incredible violence and sadness that rumbles like bass through Dalton’s voice on this release.
For example, Dalton’s rendition of folk staple ‘Katie Cruel’, as it’s arranged here, shows why her In My Own Time version is so popular; rarely does one instrument and voice sound this tense and complete; Dalton’s curt strumming creating a rhythm section in itself. Stripped of accompaniment on 1966, the song brings on a goosebumpy, “wouldn’t it have been amazing to be there?” which is absent from its studio counterparts.
That feeling oozes out of 1966, from the tender recordings of Tim Neil’s ‘Green Rocky Road’ to the poignant rendering of his ‘Other Side Of This Life’, sung in duet with her husband Richard Tucker. In true folk style Dalton was a fantastic interpreter, and among arrangements of Neil songs we also get Tim Hardin, traditional pieces like ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’ and a version of ‘God Bless The Child’ by Billie Holiday. Perhaps because it was never intended for release, 1966 brings with it that close-to-the-bone-but-alien sense of transience that her studio albums either struggle or don’t intend to find.
Indeed, transience is part of what has made Dalton’s rediscovery (or discovery, for plenty) so successful. Through these performances we get a window to into a time and place that’s at once unknowable and empathetically felt by the listener. It’s a pleasure best experienced through recordings like these — underlining the strange paradox that, having spent so long not knowing who Karen Dalton was, our best shot at fully appreciating her gifts may still lie in just that lack of familiarity. Chris Woolfrey
