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I forget what year it was, probably around '77, but I was in the process of expanding my musical palette and ran across, buried away in a pile of ridiculously cheap vinyl at a warehouse store in West L.A., an LP by someone I'd never heard of, a woman by the name of Karen Dalton. The LP was fairly plain and titled In My Own Time, which seemed to be a play on a song I was familiar with. Flipping it over, I noted a very eclectic selection of songs but, yep, especially a cover of Butterfield's In My Own Dream from one of my favorite early bluesrock LPs. Getting home with the disc, I tossed it on the turntable and was dumbstruck to hear what seemed to be Billie Holiday covering Paul Butterfield! Moving to her rendition of How Sweet It is to be Loved by You, I was further stunned. This woman had completely turned the standard around, reshaping the pop soul hit into a honky tonked semi-jazz swing shuffle. And it's that chameleonic inner aesthetic transposition mode which distinguished the tormented chanteuse, causing Dylan, Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, and the inner circle of the folk elite of the day to laud her unique virtues. The woman, however, was a Salinger-esque figure whom the promo lit designates as "remote, mercurial". That only begins the catalogue. Karen Dalton was born Cheyenne, boasted a dark beauty, went through a rather intense set of rounds with hard drugs, drink, and men, and could not bear city life, forever escaping to woods and mountains to maintain a fragile temperament. Her wild spirit found civilization too capricious, malevolent, destructive, and cruel.