Search - Karen Dalton :: Green Rocky Road

This is the one!

michael mee | uk | 07/12/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"TRACK LISTING:

1. Green Rocky Road

2. Whoopee Ti Yi Yo

3. Ribbon Bow

4. Katie Cruel

5. Little Margret

6. Red Rockin' Chair

7. Nottingham Town

8. Skillet Good and Greasy

9. In the evening



Green Rocky Road is as close as we'll ever get to hearing the record Karen Dalton would have made in 1963. Discovered on the same reel-to-reel tapes that yielded the live performances comprising the Cotton Eyed Joe release, were nine home recordings of Dalton left alone, with no one watching, no audience to please. Accompanied solely by her own sturdy banjo picking and 12 string strumming, her deep blue, smoky-throated singing evokes the voices and faces of past lives lived - the broken-backed pioneer, the coalminer black with shadow, the stained fingers of the slave, the prostitute...the dead and forgotten. Karen was perhaps the last true folk singer and that's the bases of the potent appeal of her enigmatic art and of her commercial failure during her too-brief lifetime.



Karen took the opportunity to play music just as she pleased, very much part of the authentic "folk" process of transmission and translation that had operated in this country for centuries. Like her predecessors in this tradition she drew on whatever material caught her fancy whether it was a farm laborer's song she'd learned as a child or a Ray Charles' tune she'd heard on the radio the day before and every style. While the foundation was rural home-brewed music that base was informed by jazz, pop, big band blues - the music that Leadbelly and his generation of folk singers did not perform for the revivalist audience. The synthesis she produced was perplexing, mysterious and excitingly innovative to the folks involved in New York's revivalist scene who were primarily playing traditional songs as faithful to the version they'd first heard on Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music collection or in some hushed coffee house as possible. Or were just in the early stages of recasting some of the lyrics to those sorts of songs. Within a few years the likes of Tim Hardin, Fred Neil and Bob Dylan would have evolved radically new styles starting from the folk base and gone on to varying degrees of fortune and fame.



By the time Karen recorded her first two studio albums in the late 60's and early 70's the musical world had changed radically and her own oeuvre was an anomalous anachronism. She and her more successful friends in the music business made valiant attempts to build bridges to the new rock audience that'd arisen trying to put her amazing voice and playing in a contemporary context on It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best and In My Own Time. Both records are entirely enchanting and dazzlingly original. But they couldn't present Karen on her own terms like Green Rocky Road does."

Not the Least rocky

Michael Haddan | so cal | 05/19/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"No one has taken me by storm recently as much as Karen Dalton, and this cd is equal to each of her others as valuable archives of her incredible gift and likeablity. I bought all of the current ones available and often put all of them in my cd player to play repeatedly during the day or night. She really takes me there. She is the real deal and sought not to 'make it' in the music industry as much as bring the essence of her soul to the forefront. She accomplished this and more."

Poor Oklahoma Girl/Dylan's favorite singer!

Ralph and Martha Wright | Djibouti, Africa | 03/23/2009

(4 out of 5 stars)

"She never got much acclaim in her lifetime, but hers is a one of a kind voice. This disc may be the best representation of her skills, though not the best sounding, as 'tis home recordings... If ye like 60s folk and blues, ye gotta hear this gold mine"