Tír Na HiFi

After the recommendations here I picked up some of her stuff and I actually like it a lot. Yes, its ahem, raw but very honest and very listenable.

What became of her?

Fran wrote:After the recommendations here I picked up some of her stuff and I actually like it a lot. Yes, its ahem, raw but very honest and very listenable.

What became of her?

I know she was homeless in New York in the '90s but after that... nothing. Maybe wiki would know, will check later. She didn't do conventional gigs or interviews as so was useless to the music industry, she just wouldn't play the game. I love that voice, a folkie Ella or Billie really.

Wiki says

She reputedly died in 1993 on the streets of New York after an eight-year battle with AIDS.[3] However, an article in Uncut magazine,[4] confirmed that Dalton was actually being cared for by the guitarist Peter Walker in upstate New York during her last months.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Dalton

A tragic end...

Hard to believe but I was actually looking at a couple of Lps today by a chap I never heard of; the very same chap who was supposed to be caring for Karen in her final days. His name? Peter Walker!



"However, an article in Uncut magazine,[4] confirmed that Dalton was actually being cared for by the guitarist Peter Walker in upstate New York during her last months."




"Peter Walker is an American folk guitarist noted for dextrous instrumental pieces that reference the Indian classical and Spanish flamenco traditions. Recognised principally for his recorded output in the mid-to-late sixties, his rediscovery by the current generation of American and European outsider folk artists has seen his work accorded similar reverence to that of other notable American finger-pickers such as John Fahey, Robbie Basho and Leo Kottke, and granted him a renewed platform for both touring and recording."

been getting into a bit of country over the last few months - stuff like the one above, and joined by Gram Parsons (who sparked my interest after reading the Keith Richards biog), Townes Van Zandt mainly.

Any suggestions for others?

Fran wrote:been getting into a bit of country over the last few months.... Any suggestions for others?

I'll get back to you with a very long list on that.

Going to be hard to beat "Ol' no. 1", one of the seminal Texas country records
Try Robert Earl Keen, Joe Ely, Rachel Harrington & Gillian Welch (for a start)
R

Ivor wrote:

Fran wrote:After the recommendations here I picked up some of her stuff and I actually like it a lot. Yes, its ahem, raw but very honest and very listenable.

What became of her?

I know she was homeless in New York in the '90s but after that... nothing. Maybe wiki would know, will check later. She didn't do conventional gigs or interviews as so was useless to the music industry, she just wouldn't play the game. I love that voice, a folkie Ella or Billie really.

Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times 24th Dec, writing about various bits of "art" he'd discovered during 2011...

‘Katie Cruel’

by Karen Dalton

The estimable Philip King played this track on South Wind Blows during the summer, and it has been in my head since. I’d never heard of Dalton, except that Bob Dylan in Chronicles describes her as his favourite singer on the early-1960s Greenwich Village folk scene. She never made it big and died in 1993 after a long struggle with drugs and alcohol. This track, from 1971, has all the anguish that must have underlain such a fate. It has a coruscating bleakness and a chorus that chimed with the year: “If I was where I would be / I would be where I am not / Here I am where I must be / Go where I would, I cannot.”

Right, that's my next play........