Description
Karen Dalton is one of the tragic ciphers, an Oklahoma-born folksinger who played a long-neck banjo and a 12-string guitar and sang weary, welling songs about bad and broken loves. For decades, late-arriving fans were told she died of AIDS, penniless and displaced, curled up on a New York City street corner. Dalton wasn’t known as a songwriter—neither record contains a single original composition—but Walker, who oversees her estate, emerged recently with a stack of song lyrics (verses, snippets, poems) that she never got around to recording, or, maybe, never intended to. Remembering Mountains is maybe the closest we’ll ever get to hearing Dalton’s own articulations of heartache, although plenty was communicated on her first two records, regardless of whether the words there were her own.
