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A distinct otherworldliness seems to be the natural by-product of the strident, ringing quality possessed by certain stringed instruments, notably the psaltery and the dulcimer. It’s a quality that is present from the first notes of Troubadour, Dorothy Carter’s 1976 debut album, and it’s something that was recognised a couple of decades later by the progenitors of the burgeoning New Weird America scene. Artists like Devendra Banhart, Espers and Joanna Newsom looked back to a specifically weird shade of outsider folk for their primary inspiration, and artists like Carter, Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs, Donovan, Karen Dalton and Jean Ritchie.
Carter was an outlier, even amongst outliers. She came late to recorded music – she was already in her forties by the time Troubadour was released – and by the time she hit upon her signature sound, the folk revival was apparently moribund, its scions subsumed into prog (Roy Harper), jazz (Joni Mitchell) or copious amounts of cocaine. The Bob Dylan of 1976 was still singing protest songs – this was the year of Desire, of Rubin Carter’s rise to public prominence in the lyrics of Hurricane – but he was doing so under a thick veneer of high-production, big-band country rock. When the wheel finally turned again, and those psych-folk pioneers found a new audience in the early 2000s, the rediscoveries (and subsequent reissues) came thick and fast, but for reasons unknown, Carter fell off the radar. Whether she was considered unmarketable, whether she didn’t quite fit in with the colourful late-sixties image of artists like Bunyan and Donovan or whether she was simply unlucky, we may never know.
That all changed last year when Palto Flats released her 1978 masterpiece Waillie Waillie. It was immediately obvious on songs like The Squirrel is a Funny Thing that her influence on Joanna Newsom – the best and most enduring of the 2000s crop of artists – was probably as big as that of Bunyan. Newsom took the rangy but untutored creak of Carter’s voice and ran with it. There are snippets of Carter’s songs, characterised by a certain unique phrasing or melodic sensibility, that could easily be mistaken for parts of The Milk-Eyed Mender (an album which itself turned twenty earlier this year). Carter’s lengthy, compartmentalised, almost conceptual Summer Rhapsody found its echoes on Newsom’s later, longer works.
It makes perfect sense then that Carter’s debut has now been released by Drag City, home of Joanna Newsom and any number of outsider geniuses. Troubadour feels different to Waillee Waillee. For all the wild abandon of its songs, there was something curated, self-contained, symmetrical about Waillee Waillee, as if by that point, Carter had taught herself something of the received wisdom of how to construct an album. Troubadour, by contrast, is Carter in the raw. She had already been playing music for decades, but this was the first time she had chosen to record anything professionally, so it’s understandable that this album feels jam-packed with ideas. As a pure outpouring of creativity, it is comparable in some ways to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass.
That bright, chiming opener, Troubadour Song, provides a vehicle for Carter’s direct and rhythmic approach to her instrument. Her influence on later artists is immediately apparent, but so too is her debt to the past – not just to the Appalachian folk of Jean Ritchie but to mediaeval music. In fact, she borrows from hundreds of years of musical history; perhaps her greatest skill is making all of those centuries sound like her own. The old folk song Binnorie becomes a haunting instrumental ballad that seems to suspend time. Even the very shortest of pieces, like the twenty-five-second Lark in the Morning, feels complete and fully realised.
Troubadour Songs on the Psaltery ratchets up the combination of melancholic and bucolic, which would later find favour with the weird folk crew while also showcasing Carter’s innate melodic sensibilities. Ballinderry and the quick-fingered Visiting Song provide object lessons in breathing new life into old melodies, and The King of Glory is punchy, pungent and exalted, teasing the strangest strands out of celebratory religious music: it has the unmistakeably cultish tang of the Incredible String Band about it.
A delicate, pastoral mood pervades The Morning Star, while the brief Ukrainian Carol is a shimmering veil of sound. There is something immensely transportive about Carter’s music, and given the short duration of many of these pieces, it is almost as if she is picking you up and putting you down again at will, in a different landscape or a different century. Her magic ingredient, whatever that may be, means that you never feel rushed or jolted.
For all her apparent folksiness, there was always a quiet hint of the avant-garde about Carter. Much of her career was spent working with Bob Rutman, a big name in new age, drone and early ambient music. The pair were both members of Central Maine Power Company, an experimental improv group which also included new-age pioneer Constance Demby. That influence can be felt in the first droning notes of Make a Joyful Sound, the album’s fourth track and the first to feature Carter’s vocals. Her singing here, and on the wonderfully languid closer Shirt of Lace, is beautiful, confident in its own strange abilities. The Cuckoo is a perfect demonstration of how traditional folk song and experimental new-age music can coexist without sounding twee or forced. Best of all, perhaps, is the epic Tree of Life, which begins with a series of warped, futuristic notes and grows into a rich tapestry, where her voice seems to penetrate the dulcimer’s gauzy soundscape like indelible ink.
In the end, Dorothy Carter found fame of a sort: in 1996, she formed Mediæval Bæbes with Katherine Blake and, in doing so, brought early music to a whole new audience. But up to that point, her musical career followed a unique and strange trajectory. She was a lifelong busker, at times a partial hermit, an avid and iconoclastic challenger of musical boundaries. She studied in the most prestigious music schools in New York, Paris and London and sought her spiritual education in monastic seclusion in Mexico. Towards the end of her life, she held court in a live-in studio in New Orleans, and she died of an aneurysm in 2003.
Two months after Carter’s death, an article by David Keenan appeared in The Wire magazine, which used, for the first time, the phrase New Weird America. Early in the following year, the acts that would come to define that movement were represented on the epochal Golden Apples of the Sun compilation. Amongst them were Newsom, Banhart, Espers, Josephine Foster and Anohni (then known as Antony). The debt these artists owe to Carter is considerable, if at times hard to pin down, and it seems like a cruel twist of fate that she missed out on experiencing the sudden mad rush of creativity that her music helped to inspire. But this reissue, along with that of Waillee Waillee, is a good sign that her star is once again in the ascendency, and when the next freak folk revival comes along, it’s not hard to predict that these singular, strange and beautiful tunes will be there at the forefront.
Troubadour (30 August 2024) Drag City
Order: https://lnk.to/troubadour
