Karen Dalton – In My Own Time

Happens all the time: You play a track by Karen Dalton for an unsuspecting listener, their eyes widen, and they exclaim, “Who the hell is that?!”

The surprise is never unexpected, nor is the unfamiliarity. The most reluctant of recording artists, Dalton recorded little more than an hour of music in the studio. A grad of New York’s Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s, she shared stages at Folk City and Cafe Wha? with such admirers as Bob Dylan and Fred Neil.

She was an interpreter and not a songwriter, but her intoxicating horn-like voice, more a thing of jazz than of folk, set her apart from the crowd. She is invariably compared to Billie Holiday; her nimble twelve-string work summons the shade of Blind Willie McTell. Stricken with wanderlust and tormented by drug and alcohol addictions, Dalton died, nearly forgotten, in 1993.

In the interim, her music has been passed hand-to-hand, and her cult includes such acolytes as Devendra Banhart and Nick Cave, both of whom contributed notes to the reissue of her second, and final, album, the 1971 release In My Own Time. While this long-unheard collection lacks the late-night vibe of her 1969 Capitol debut It’s Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best (reissued by Koch in 1997), it supplies further compelling evidence of Dalton’s amazing interpretive gifts.

Recorded at Woodstock’s Bearsville Studio for Just Sunshine Records, a short-lived label operated by Woodstock Festival co-promoter Michael Lang, In My Own Time was a largely successful attempt to update Dalton’s folk-club style in an of-the-moment singer-songwriter production style. Bassist Harvey Brooks helmed the project; the hired firepower included guitarists Amos Garrett and John Hall, steel man Ben Keith, pianist John Simon, and violinist Bobby Notkoff.

These studio heavies never take the spotlight away from Dalton. While her guitar work is in short supply, she delivers several luminous vocal performances. She offers a supple, off-kilter version of Marvin Gaye’s hit “How Sweet It Is”; a reverie-like reading of Paul Butterfield’s “In My Own Dream”; an aching cover of George Jones’ “Take Me”; and a hair-raising rendition of The Band’s “In A Station”. The singing is mercurial, intimate, and wised-up — when she wails “Saaaave me” at the climax of “In A Station”, you know the music is not just being sung, but has been lived.