Karen Dalton: In My Own Time (Just Sunshine/Paramount)
This article originally appeared on Rolling Stone, July 22nd, 1971
KAREN DALTON is a folk legend whose name is spoken with reverence on MacDougal St., in Woodstock, in Texas, or anyplace else where she has performed. She surfaced in the Village in the early Sixties and quickly became friends with Dino Valenti and Fred Neil. Five years ago she recorded an obscure album and then she vanished into the country. Mike Lang beckoned her to Woodstock to be the first release on his Just Sunshine label and the result is this new album, produced by Harvey Brooks with a cast of a dozen of the finest Woodstock musicians, including John Hall, John Simon, Dennis Siewell, and Bill Keith.
The source of Karen's legend is her voice. Like Rita Coolidge whom she sounds a bit like, she is not a songwriter but she sings with so much subtlety and taste that her interpretations are creations of their own. In his liner notes, Fred Neil remembers the first time he saw her: "She did 'Blues On the Ceiling' (which is my song) with so much feeling that if she told me she had written it herself, I would have believed her." She sounds almost black at times, other times like a soft Janis Joplin. At her best her sound is hauntingly beautiful, addictive.
Her mood is always melancholy, the songs all complex and three-dimensional. Her treatment of The Band's 'In A Station' is fantastic: as far as I know this is the first time another artist has recorded the song. Likewise, her 'When A Man Loves A Woman' makes me forget the Percy Sledge original and her 'In My Own Dream' is more likely to find a place in history than the Paul Butterfield original. My two favorite songs on the album are 'Something On Your Mind', an exquisite Dino Valenti love song, and 'Katie Cruel', a stunningly simple arrangement of the classic folk song. Bobby Notkoff's violin (he can also be heard on recent Neil Young LPs) on the latter helps make it an almost religious interpretation of the ballad.
The album is not without flaw. Some tracks ('How Sweet It Is', for example) are overproduced. In general the occasional horns don't add to her singing and the album works best where the arrangements are simplest.
Karen Dalton is not the sort of artist who will ever be completely captured by an album but she performs so rarely it is truly a joy that her brilliance is now available to everyone. There's magic on this record and its worth getting into. The Karen Dalton legend can only grow with the release of In My Own Time.
