Karen Dalton – 1966 (2012)

Picture the great American folk artists of the 1960s and 70s sitting for a group portrait; Karen Dalton’s there, but her figure’s a blur, flitting restlessly out of frame. Dalton hated recording and felt at best ambivalent about performing in front of strangers (she much preferred playing for friends, on porches and in living rooms), which means that although she’s got one of those voices that gets talked about in hushed, reverent tones by everyone from Bob Dylan to Devendra Banhart, she preferred to sit out the kind of rituals that secure a person a snug spot in the canon. She didn’t don face paint and a gypsy costume and hit the road with the Rolling Thunder Revue, she didn’t dance The Last Waltz under Scorsese’s spotlights, and– years after her flight from Greenwich Village to Colorado– she’s present on the Basement Tapes only as the elusive subject of Richard Manuel’s beguiled plea: “Dear Katie, if you can hear me…/ How much longer will you be gone?”