how did the feeling feel to you

One other exciting thing happened on Tuesday - the long-awaited remastered release of Karen Dalton's second album, In My Own Time. Part of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s, Karen Dalton seems to have inspired many artists and created few songs. She's pictured above with Fred Neil and Bob Dylan, who cites her as one of his influences. She's often compared to contemporaries Vashti Bunyan and Linda Perhacs and referenced in discussions of Josephine Foster and Joanna Newsom. Pitchfork claims that she hated the most frequent comparison to Billie Holliday. She battled the usual demons before her death in 1993.

I received Dalton's first release - It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best - as a gift and after growing accustomed to her unusual voice, I have almost worn it out through constant rotation. The album is worth buying for the liner notes alone that tell of a single mother who hated performing but found music to be the only way she could relate to people. Reed Fischer of Paper Thin Walls writes:

Folk luminary Bert Jansch and newbies White Magic have both released versions of "Katie Cruel" this year, and each is greatly indebted to Karen Dalton’s 1971 interpretation of the traditional tune. Dalton, also known as Sweet Mother KD, unleashes each note with a weathered bray that sounds less jarring to Banhart-ized ears than it did when she was kicking around New York in the ’60s with Fred Neil and Bob Dylan. Like Billie Holiday’s thick, dirty-on-purpose tones even further unhinged, Dalton’s alto is rife with bends and rasps that turn in on themselves. “When first I came to town/They bought me drinks aplenty/Now they’ve changed their tune/Hand me the bottles empty,” she sings as a woman in her 30s. But vocally, Dalton doubles her age and plants herself in a ramshackle hut with a lifetime of regret. Her masterful long-neck banjo picking and the shrill violin in the background roll together like dust on the road to a foreign, timeless place. Much like how Nick Drake predicted his posthumous notoriety on “Fruit Tree,” Dalton makes “Katie Cruel” about her own doomed career by the final stanza: “If I was where I would be/Then I’d be where I am not/Here I am where I must be/Where I would be I cannot.” In My Own Time was Dalton’s second and final album, and her hard life ended in 1993.

You can stream "Katie Cruel" here. There are some other sound files at Stefan Wirz's fan site, where I found the photo above, and at NPR. She even has a decent MySpace page. At the Seattle Weekly, Brian J. Barr asks, "Why wasn't she huge?"
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