next music: Karen Dalton

When my monthly emusic downloads refresh I’ll be rushing out to buy this album from Karen Dalton.

I was pottering round the kitchen late one night, listening to the talented (and sadly graveyard-shifted) John Creedon on RTE Radio when this very eerie, nasally-timbred voice came over the airwaves and it turned out to be a song called Are You Leaving for the Country by Karen Dalton. Not sure whether she was male or female when I heard her first.

She was half Cherokee and beautiful with it, played a long necked banjo and hung round with amongst others Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village in the early 60s. Sparse in her recorded output. Favourite singer of all time for Nick Cave, so I suppose that’s an endorsement of sorts.

She died in 1993.