TUE., JANUARY 02, 2007
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Freak Folk Grandma: Karen Dalton
by Keith Harris
If I had any doubts about the sheer totality of information overload, this year made it official — I can’t even keep up with the past anymore. The professional obligation to sift through the many audio consumables of 2006 and whip up some coherent summation of the-year-that-was reminded me why I long ago jettisoned the youthful dream (so common among the borderline obsessive-compulsive sorts who become music critics) to keep perpetually up-to-the-minute with pop. Instead I trimmed my horizons and, nonetheless, was nearly lost forever in the thicket of recent country and folk reissues, until Karen Dalton kindly showed me a way out.
Originally released in 1971, reissued this year by the Light in the Attic label, Dalton’s In My Own Time is a year-end kind of record. And it’s not just the disc’s Decembery chill that lends it that retrospective feel. With R&B hits “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “How Sweet It Is” bumping up against a George Jones cut, and a song by her pals in the Band sitting aside the creaky traditional “Katie Cruel,” the song choices are varied enough to invoke the knee-jerk classification for such stylistic ranginess: “versatile.” But Dalton’s picks come off not as a calculated display of virtuoso eclecticism, but rather a fond glance back at her era’s recent past, when pop became the new folk music.
Dalton reportedly hated the way her voice continually generated references to Billie Holiday (most notably from Dylan, a Dalton enthusiast since she first hit the New York in the early '60s, and a more perceptive music critic than most). And, in truth, that comparison might seem misleading to those of us who identify Lady Day with a particular timbre, or range of timbres. But the resemblance is there, mostly in the hesitant phrasing, the desire to tumble into a word rather than ride it upwards, heard most dramatically in “How Sweet It Is.” Marvin Gaye (and, yeah, James Taylor too) punch that last word, the “is,” as the swooping climax of an ascending melody. But Dalton lets it tumble, and the feel is either homey or resigned, and refuses to choose between the two qualities.
Then again, maybe the evocation of Holiday is just a roundabout way of noting that it takes a doomed woman to sing a doomed song. Dalton died in 1993, and there was talk then of AIDS that, whether true or not, seems irrelevant because there was even more certain talk of drugs and alcohol. Long beloved of Devendra Banhart, Dalton’s also been appointed the spiritual, or at least aesthetic godmother of similarly folkish oddballs like Joanna Newsom, and perhaps those descendants hear the same sense of expansive possibility that marks their work. That’s the sort of creative mishearing, after all, that’s long revitalized pop music. But though Dalton has been spoken of as a “free spirit,” that characterization doesn’t quite ring true, not even in the “nothin’ left to lose” sense of freedom.
What I hear, instead, is a woman making the most of her constitutional freakishness. In My Own Time was the second of just two records that the reluctant Dalton cut, coaxed into the studio by well wishers. As with its predecessor, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best, this feels like a fortuitous record, one that might not ever have been made. In this way, I suspect, Dalton reminds many of us of the talented friend, the one whose brilliant songs are hidden unheard on fading cassettes stacked in shoeboxes, whose poetry smudges unread in yellowed notebooks. The trick of such a record is to make us feel we’re lucky to have found it.
Maybe, in an age of electronic instantaneousness, where even the least-motivated bedroom artist can post an MP3 somewhere, or blog their thoughts, the very possibility of such an unrecognized artist verges on extinction. And though that would be good in many ways, there’d be a downside to that — a loss of the pleasures of rediscovery that accompany reissues like this, a loss in the way artists like Dalton give younger musicians and their similarly-minded fans a way to re-imagine their past that no canonical artist could provide. Fortunately, there are more unarchived obscurities where this came from, I’m sure. The future may turn out to be a lost cause, after all. But we’ll always have the past.
Originally released in 1971, reissued this year by the Light in the Attic label, Dalton’s In My Own Time is a year-end kind of record. And it’s not just the disc’s Decembery chill that lends it that retrospective feel. With R&B hits “When a Man Loves a Woman” and “How Sweet It Is” bumping up against a George Jones cut, and a song by her pals in the Band sitting aside the creaky traditional “Katie Cruel,” the song choices are varied enough to invoke the knee-jerk classification for such stylistic ranginess: “versatile.” But Dalton’s picks come off not as a calculated display of virtuoso eclecticism, but rather a fond glance back at her era’s recent past, when pop became the new folk music.
Dalton reportedly hated the way her voice continually generated references to Billie Holiday (most notably from Dylan, a Dalton enthusiast since she first hit the New York in the early '60s, and a more perceptive music critic than most). And, in truth, that comparison might seem misleading to those of us who identify Lady Day with a particular timbre, or range of timbres. But the resemblance is there, mostly in the hesitant phrasing, the desire to tumble into a word rather than ride it upwards, heard most dramatically in “How Sweet It Is.” Marvin Gaye (and, yeah, James Taylor too) punch that last word, the “is,” as the swooping climax of an ascending melody. But Dalton lets it tumble, and the feel is either homey or resigned, and refuses to choose between the two qualities.
Then again, maybe the evocation of Holiday is just a roundabout way of noting that it takes a doomed woman to sing a doomed song. Dalton died in 1993, and there was talk then of AIDS that, whether true or not, seems irrelevant because there was even more certain talk of drugs and alcohol. Long beloved of Devendra Banhart, Dalton’s also been appointed the spiritual, or at least aesthetic godmother of similarly folkish oddballs like Joanna Newsom, and perhaps those descendants hear the same sense of expansive possibility that marks their work. That’s the sort of creative mishearing, after all, that’s long revitalized pop music. But though Dalton has been spoken of as a “free spirit,” that characterization doesn’t quite ring true, not even in the “nothin’ left to lose” sense of freedom.
What I hear, instead, is a woman making the most of her constitutional freakishness. In My Own Time was the second of just two records that the reluctant Dalton cut, coaxed into the studio by well wishers. As with its predecessor, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best, this feels like a fortuitous record, one that might not ever have been made. In this way, I suspect, Dalton reminds many of us of the talented friend, the one whose brilliant songs are hidden unheard on fading cassettes stacked in shoeboxes, whose poetry smudges unread in yellowed notebooks. The trick of such a record is to make us feel we’re lucky to have found it.
Maybe, in an age of electronic instantaneousness, where even the least-motivated bedroom artist can post an MP3 somewhere, or blog their thoughts, the very possibility of such an unrecognized artist verges on extinction. And though that would be good in many ways, there’d be a downside to that — a loss of the pleasures of rediscovery that accompany reissues like this, a loss in the way artists like Dalton give younger musicians and their similarly-minded fans a way to re-imagine their past that no canonical artist could provide. Fortunately, there are more unarchived obscurities where this came from, I’m sure. The future may turn out to be a lost cause, after all. But we’ll always have the past.
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