some Lenny content

[Phil Grabar <pgrabar>]

Dylan helps remember pair of "unsung heroes"

By Chris MorrisThu Aug 31, 1:45 AM ET

With the release of his new album "Modern Times" this week, 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 (who shared a girlfriend with the older singer) in the 
notes to the 1985 retrospective "Biograph." The film, to be screened 
in September during the Americana Music Assn. 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.

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 November 7, Seattle-based Light 
in the Attic Records will rerelease his 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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