Manafonistas

Karen Dalton arrived in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s folk revival with songs she´d learned growing up in Oklahoma and a voice that held a reedy, startling, bluesy quaver. She took banjo lessons, too. There are ghost stories in misic history: names that ring a bell for the happy few, names that once were real persons casting a shadow, chasing shadows. She was praised by Bob Dylan and cherished on the coffeehouse circuit, but she recorded only two studio albums, in 1969 and 1971, full of other people´s songs. During the 1970s she gave up performing in public; she died in 1993. Now it turns out she was writing lyrics of her own, plain-spoken and striking ones, like these from „Don’t Make It Easy“: „Things you said don´t leave my head/I may take my time forgetting you.“ Did you never hear her sing „Something On Your Mind“? That bluesy quaver, smoking signs from a life long gone, a heartache, another heartache. For „Remembering Mountains“ (Tompkins Square), 11 songwriters, all women, wrote music for Dalton´s lyrics. They came up with ballads: bluesy ones like Patty Griffin´s „All That Shines Is Not Truth“ and Lucinda Williams´s „Met an Old Friend“, folky ones like Isobel Campbell´s „Don´t Make It Easy“, and Minimalist ones like Julia Holter´s „My Love, My Love“. Working separately, the songwriters converged in lonely reflection; the album adds up to a composite portrait of a ghost. One minor quibble, Robert Wyatt (one man!:)) should have been here, too, on Memory Lane. (NYT, B.R. „Ghost Remix“ )

„Something On Your Mind“