Dylan Helps Remember Pair Of 'Unsung Heroes'
- From: "52stations" <hwycdrrev@xxxxxxx>
- Date: 31 Aug 2006 11:46:04 -0700
http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003085778
Dylan Helps Remember Pair Of 'Unsung Heroes'
Karen Dalton
August 31, 2006, 10:45 AM ET
Chris Morris, The Hollywood Reporter
With the release this week of his new album, "Modern Times," Bob Dylan
has been inescapable in the press. But a short film and an album
reissue will put the spotlight on a pair of Dylan's contemporaries on
the '60s New York folk scene who have hitherto escaped wide notice,
despite their esteemed colleague's expressions of respect.
Writer/director Sandra Hale Schulman's 13-minute mini-documentary "The
Ballad of Peter LaFarge" shines new light on the titular
singer/songwriter, who was called "one of the unsung heroes of his day"
by Dylan in the notes to the 1985 retrospective "Biograph." The film,
to be screened in September during the Americana Music Association
conference in Nashville, prefaces the 2007 release of a tribute album
-- which will include Dylan's 1970 recording of LaFarge's "The Ballad
of Ira Hayes" -- and an all-star concert.
Meanwhile, in his 2005 memoir "Chronicles Volume One," Dylan recalled
Karen Dalton as "my favorite singer" at Greenwich Village's Cafe Wha?
Dalton, whose jazzy, legato style summoned comparisons to Billie
Holiday, recorded only two albums. On Nov. 7, Seattle-based Light in
the Attic Records will rerelease the elusive second LP, the 1971 set
"In My Own Time." The package will include notes by Patti Smith Group
guitarist and music scholar Lenny Kaye and musician-fans Nick Cave and
Devendra Banhart.
LaFarge, who died in 1965, and Dalton, who died in 1993, had much in
common. Both were part American Indian, both grappled with drug and
alcohol problems and both were active at the height of the Village folk
boom but quickly faded from view. Images of them -- footage of LaFarge
singing "Ira Hayes," a photo of Dalton performing with Dylan and her
mentor Fred Neil -- flit by in Martin Scorsese's Dylan documentary "No
Direction Home."
LaFarge was better known: He recorded for Columbia and Folkways and
wrote most of "Bitter Tears," Johnny Cash's 1964 concept album. When
Schulman began researching LaFarge's life after Cash died, she says she
found "all this weird information. ... It was very spotty. It was
shocking."
Discovering that most of the available "facts" about LaFarge were
wrong, Schulman set out making a short film, to be included on a
tribute DualDisc. "The Ballad of Peter LaFarge" surveys the musician's
life -- his privileged upbringing as the son of Pulitzer-winning
novelist Oliver LaFarge, his work as an actor and rodeo rider, his
meteoric folk career -- coolly and briskly through a photo montage and
narration. It will be included with the album "Rare Breed," which will
feature tracks by Cash, John Trudell, Hank Williams III and the Doors'
John Densmore, among others.
Bearing a voice, as Kaye puts it, "as much horn as vocal cord," Dalton
has bred her own cult. Light in the Attic co-owner Matt Sullivan
discovered her through Koch's 1997 reissue of her debut, "It's So Hard
to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best." Although not a songwriter,
Sullivan notes, she was a unique talent: "She makes these songs
completely her own -- they're not even covers, in a sense."
After protracted negotiations with Michael Lang -- the promoter of the
original Woodstock music festival, who released "In My Own Time" on his
label, Just Sunshine Records -- Light in the Attic finally secured the
rights. Sullivan hopes to reach a new audience that may have heard
about Dalton through her legion of performing admirers. "It's so rare
to find a record that so many generations latch onto," he says.
.
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