Karen Dalton’s smoked honey vocals are one of the most gut-wrenching things you could fill your ears with from the rich repository of music that sprung from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s. If you haven’t done that already, do so, now. I’ll wait for you.
You done now? Those two great records you just listened to are the sum total of Dalton’s studio material during her lifetime, and none of the songs on those albums were written by Dalton herself. Tragedy, right?
In the same vein of Woody Guthrie’s Mermaid Avenue recordings, which saw Billy Bragg and Wilco take some lost Guthrie lyrics and set them to music, Dalton’s estate manager Peter Walker (a kickass American Primitive guitarist in his own right) has teamed up with Tompkins Square and assembled a lineup of great current-day female musicians and given them some lyrics and poems from Dalton’s archives to turn into songs.
The assembled lineup including Sharon Van Etta, Marissa Nadler, and Isobell Campbell is more like a wishlist than a tracklist, but somehow it’s happened, and now you can listen to that too, when Tompkins Square releases Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton on May 26.
Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton tracklist:
01. Remembering Mountains - Sharon Van Etten
02. All That Shines Is Not Truth - Patty Griffin
03. This Is Our Love - Diane Cluck
04. My Love, My Love - Julia Holter
05. Met An Old Friend - Lucinda Williams
06. So Long Ago and Far Away - Marissa Nadler
07. Blue Notion - Laurel Halo
08. For The Love I’m In - Larkin Grimm
09. Don’t Make It Easy - Isobell Campbell
10. At Last The Night Has Ended - Tara Jane O’Neill
11. Met An Old Friend - Josephine Foster
• Tompkins Square: http://www.tompkinssquare.com
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