VA - Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs By Karen Dalton

"How many albums full of songs sung by Karen Dalton exist? Not many, technically, yet relics and stories from the folk singer's short life keep emerging. For instance, they say Dalton hated being recorded and the existence of her 1969 album It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best was the result of trickery. That and 1971's In My Own Time are the only two albums she ever officially released.

For years it seemed no other Dalton recordings existed, until Nashville-based label Delmore released the double-disc Cotton Eyed Joe, a collection of her live recordings at the Attic, a tiny venue in Boulder, Colorado. Then, Green Rocky Road appeared in 2008, a collection of songs that Dalton had recorded herself, somewhat dismissing the idea that she feared or disliked the process of recording. Finally, Delmore released another collection of unearthed recordings by Dalton and her husband Richard Tucker entitled 1966 in 2012, and that was where her story rested until now. Even when the album tally made its way up to five, none of these records included original material from Dalton. It’s also been claimed that she never wrote her own songs, but like many things about her, we don’t really know that. We don’t really know anything about the enigmatic, rebellious singer except what comes to us in trickles through friends and lost remnants of her meager estate.

There has to be someone who picks up those threads and stitches them together, and in this case it was Josh Rosenthal of Tompkins Square. Rosenthal struck up a working relationship and a friendship with guitarist Peter Walker, a fellow folk musician and close friend of Dalton during her life. One day, Walker showed Rosenthal a file of Dalton’s personal papers he had kept: it contained everything from handwritten lyrics and poems, to notes about appointments and transcribed folk songs. Some of the lyrics she had written even had chords set to them. Walker ended up collecting these papers and self-publishing a book, spurring Rosenthal to eventually enlist some of his favorite female artists to cover and rework these lyrics into song." - Stereogum