In 1962, Karen Dalton, her husband, and her daughter lived in a small shack in the Colorado mountains, with no electricity or running water, but a splendid view and plenty of space to ride horses. Occasionally, Dalton would play at the Attic, which at that time was the nucleus for Boulder's folk scene. As Joe Loop, the club's co-proprietor and a friend of Dalton's proclaims, "Folk music was in the midst of its most popular period so when Karen performed there, [the audience] really listened. You can tell she was comfortable when you listen to the recordings." To hear contemporaries and historians tell it, Dalton rarely settled anywhere for long, so for her to find a place where she felt musically at home seems important, at least in retrospect. Fortunately, Loop had the good sense to record some of Dalton's shows at the Attic, and nearly a half-century later, Nashville-based Delmore Recordings is releasing it as Cotton Eyed Joe: The Loop Tapes - Live in Boulder - 1962, a 2xCD/1xDVD set that's a boon for Dalton enthusiasts as well as those who discovered her from last year's re-issue of In My Own Time.
Loop's tapes are necessarily scratchy and lo-fi, the audio equivalent of a creased sepia-tone photograph. Occasionally, Dalton's performance strains the capabilities of the recording devices, as on the jarring "Fannin' Street", but most of the songs make this technological drawback a defining aesthetic. The haunted "It's Alright", completely reinventing Ray Charles' original, sounds like it's echoing directly from 1962; likewise the dusty narrative "Old Hannah", which foregoes the guitar, leaving only Dalton's voice to fill the Attic space. "Prettiest Train" in particular is a lo-fi opus: Dalton's hard strums and guitar slaps mix into a roughly percussive rhythm for her upbeat blues variation, and she hits the last syllable of each verse line with added force, as if she's singing in italics-- "Honey, don't you marry no convict man!" Her consciously and regularly placed accents give the melody a slight rush against her guitar, creating an urgent calamity that sounds barely controlled and more intensely dire than anything else she ever did.
Loop is right: Dalton, in her mid-twenties at this time, does seem more comfortable in this setting than on either of her two studio albums. Or, more to the point, she sounds more powerful on these songs, recorded seven years before her proper debut, It's Always Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You Best. Reportedly, Dalton hated recording-- she had to be tricked into recording that debut-- but the stage is obviously her milieu, especially in an intimate room filled with attentive listeners. There can't be more than a dozen people in the audience, hardly enough to call it a crowd, but they respond to these songs, not just in their clapping but in their silence. Dalton feeds off this dynamic, drawing sharp and confident lines through these old songs. She slows "Cotton Eyed Joe" to a crawl and sings it as a folk pastoral, then switches from guitar to banjo (reportedly carved from a bedpost) on "One May Morning" and the curious "Mole in the Ground".
When Dalton speaks (and she barely does), her voice sounds grandmotherly: worn around the edges by hard times and desperation. At times she sings these songs like she's covering herself with a quilt; other times she's in the wood howling in the cold. Along with her ready access to such extremes, the qualities she conveys through these songs-- the self-reliance and sense of personal freedom so valued by her folk contemporaries, as well as her almost desperate disregard for commercial prospects-- are the very same ones that both attract cratediggers and ensure her larger obscurity. Forty-five years after these recordings, Dalton remains one of folk's most fascinating footnotes.
