KAREN DALTON IN MY OWN TIME: FILM REVIEW
KAREN DALTON IN MY OWN TIME (documentary)
SBS On Demand
IT IS PERVERSE but somehow apt, distressing but not wholly devastating, and both the perfect ending to and awful climax of this life, that Karen Dalton’s personal writings, home tapes and last remnants of her art were destroyed in a fire eight years ago.
The blues and folk singer had been dead for 25 years at that point and you’d not be able to say she had been “forgotten” by the general music world as even at the time of her death her presence in popular culture, mainstream music and the consciousness of even casual music buyers was and had always been negligible. If that.
But even so, the simple facts of a musician who had been not just a contemporary of but exemplar for the likes of Bob Dylan, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the New York scene of the early ‘60s, who released only two studio albums in her career but their echo can be heard in the 21st century in the likes of Joanna Newsom, Julia Holter, Nick Cave and Marissa Nadler, and who helped carry a long line of roots music on both sides of the Atlantic via both the oral tradition and foundational recordings, are noteworthy. And worth remembering, even if you have not heard her fractured, emotionally raw, and compelling voice.
That we can do so via a record of those now lost writings and documents is down to the fact the documentary makers behind Karen Dalton In My Own Time had been at the house of Dalton’s friend, amanuensis and accidental librarian, Peter Walker, not too long before that fire and put almost everything on tape. A moment of good luck in a life and story which had precious little of it, for sure, and a rare permanent record in a career that had very little film presence, hardly any interviews, a relatively sparse live history and a recording career curtailed two decades before her death.
In Robert Yapkowitz and Richard Peete’s film – its name taken from the title of her second album and her dogged to the point of stubborn commitment to making music her own way – Dalton’s life is revealed as both unique and tragically familiar through one recovered radio interview, interviews with ex-husbands and friends, a rich but small store of Super 8 films and private photographs, and her journal entries and poetry, read by singer/songwriter Angel Olsen.
Interspersed with some quite beautiful and often spare recordings we see her misgivings about fame that undercut any chance she would ever achieve it, her mix of confidence and insecurity, the warmth that pulled people towards her and the selfish indifference that could border on callous (be it friends or her children), and her freedom to feel everything with the accompanying brutality of how that played out in her life and songs.
There’s nothing easy about it, including avoiding the temptation to wonder “what if?” or praise beyond reason, but the upsetting elements are tempered – though not absolved – by the art itself. Such pain and beauty and connection beyond location or time is special and worth marking as well as remembering.
(The film was released in 2020 and had a brief life on the documentary circuit, so it’s hardly new. But its run on SBS On Demand is nearly over, hence this prompt to check it out this month while you can.)
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