Karen Dalton – Cotton Eyed Joe: The Loop Tapes — Live In Boulder 1962

Karen Dalton sang in a resigned, motionless, foggy voice, and her twelve-string guitar playing combined folkie imprecision with blues feeling. Since her 1993 death, Dalton has been taken up as stylistic forebear by musicians such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom. The performances here were captured on reel-to-reel by Joe Loop, who owned the Attic, a folk club near the University of Colorado’s campus. Loop’s liner notes offer a fascinating portrait of a woman living rough as a single mother in a Colorado mountain cabin. The three-disc set includes a bonus DVD and stands as an excellent introduction to Dalton’s small body of work. Here, she avoids the vocal mannerisms that sometimes marred her later recordings, and her version of the blues standard “It Hurts Me Too” takes the song somewhere Elmore James never imagined.