Karen Dalton - Cotton Eyed Joe (The Loop Tapes)

Earlier this year The Guardian declared the folk singer Karen Dalton “the best singer you’ve never heard of.” Nick Caves called her his "favourite female blues singer", while her influence can be heard in the music of freak-folkies Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart. She died in relative obscurity in 1993. Her only two records 1969‘s ‘So Hard to Tell You Who's Going To Love You The Best’ and 1971’s 'In My Own Time' were both reissued late last year to great acclaim.

Dalton was an almost typically tragic and enigmatic figure. She left behind her husband in Oklahoma to travel to New York’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. She left an impression on a young Bob Dylan who in his ‘Chronicles’ described her as, “my favourite singer in the place was Karen Dalton," he remembers. "Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed."

Unfortunately she drank heavily and took drugs, including heroin, in order to soothe her troubled mind. After the commercial failure of her two albums she seemed to disappear. In the 1990s she was living on the streets of New York where she was to die a few years later.

Karen Dalton never recorded any original material but was renowned as an interpreter of other people’s songs. These skills are shown off on this two-disc collection of recordings from a small little club in Boulder, Colorado. In 1962 she stopped off in Boulder for a short while, playing shows at The Attic. ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’ is a brief, intimate lo-fi glimpse at a very special artist doing what she does best. This is no bottom of the barrel scraping exercise in futility ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’ is an all too precious document that will shine some light on long forgotten player in pop culture’s cruel theatre.

There is an intensity burning in Dalton’s soul that comes out even when she is at her most fragile. She takes Ray Charles ‘It’s Alright’ and twists it into a creepy, spidery, overwrought meditation on broken love. The title track ‘Cotton Eyed Joe’ is full of longing and desire, Dalton’s cracked voice just about managing to grab hold of your attention and make you pay attention.

The forceful ‘Prettiest Train’ is a powerful number, Dalton strumming her guitar hard as her potent wail will send shivers up your spine. Her bluesy rendition of ‘Mole In The Ground’ is a sprightly and affecting moment that manages to make time stand still so that everyone can catch up with her. The achingly beautiful ‘It Hurts Me Too’ brings to mind Cat Power at her most fragmentary. The southern gothic Americana of ‘Katie Cruel’ is dramatic and haunting, the profound certainty in Dalton’s delivery only adding to its magical appeal.

The sad tale that was Karen Dalton’s life appears to offer little redemption. All we have to make sense of this wonderful talent are a handful of albums. It isn’t much but it does provide some salvation for her memory from the indignities that befell her in life.