Karen Dalton - 1966

Karen J. Dalton (July 19, 1937 – March 19, 1993) was an American folk blues singer and banjo player associated with the early 1960s Greenwich Village folk music scene. Captured by a friend on a portable reel-to-reel, this 14-song collection finds the late folk singer in a cabin in Colorado, rehearsing for an upcoming show with her (soon-to-be-ex) husband. Dalton hated recording and felt at best ambivalent about performing in front of strangers (she much preferred playing for friends, on porches and in living rooms), which means that although she's got one of those voices that gets talked about in hushed, reverent tones by everyone from Bob Dylan to Devendra Banhart, she preferred to sit out the kind of rituals that secure a person a snug spot in the canon. She didn't don face paint and a gypsy costume and hit the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue, she didn't dance The Last Waltz under Scorsese's spotlights, and - years after her flight from Greenwich Village to Colorado - she's present on the 'Basement Tapes' only as the elusive subject of Richard Manuel's beguiled plea: "Dear Katie, if you can hear me…/ How much longer will you be gone?"

Dalton had a hard life: She struggled with a drug addiction that she never overcame, and she was more or less homeless when she died in New York in 1993. '1966' augments her legend not by romanticizing the tragedy of her life, but instead by showing the skill and depth of feeling that Dalton brought to even her most informal performances. It was an ordinary evening captured on this reel-to-reel, and the moments when the recorder drops out only add to this collection's poetry - they suggest the hundreds, maybe thousands of other times that Dalton played sets like this one for nobody in particular. She only recorded two studio albums and '1966' is one more piece to a puzzle that will never be complete-- which is of course how Dalton herself would have had it. (Pitchfork Media).

Text on OBI: Special edition, pressed on clear green rocky road vinyl. Old school tip-on jacket, exclusive 8x12"color portrait, with 4 panel heavy insert containing rare photos and 3500 word essay, download code.

Tracklist:
A1 Reason To Believe 2:24
A2 Katie Cruel 2:46
A3 Cotton Eyed Joe 3:11
A4 Green Rocky Road 3:22
A5 Don't Make Promises 2:19
A6 Other Side To This Life 3:45
B1 God Bless The Child 2:44
B2 Little Bit Of Rain 2:14
B3 While You're On Your Way 2:19
B4 Train 4:08
B5 Misery Blues 1:17
B6 Mole In The Ground 3:30
B7 Shiloh Town 2:05
B8 Hallelujah 0:40