Long player: Gem by artist whose own time came too soon

'In My Own Time' by Karen Dalton

Nick Cave says she is his favourite blues singer.

Bob Dylan and other stalwarts of the late-'60s Greenwich Village folk scene have spoken of her in similarly glowing terms.

Karen Dalton was much admired, for all the good it did her.

Dalton died in 1993, reportedly after spending the better part of a decade living rough on the streets of New York.

Just two albums, It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best (1969) and In My Own Time (1971), remain as evidence of her mercurial talent, the latter an attempt to win a wider audience through mixing traditional bluegrass and blues with soul covers.

When In My Own Time fell on deaf ears, the willowy, lank-haired Dalton handed herself over to her booze and drug demons and slid off the radar.

To those who can now appreciate the album for its brooding, earthy beauty, her descent seems all the more tragic.

Dalton's voice mixes the aching vulnerability of Billie Holliday with the reedy rasp of a saxophone.

At times the notes barely sound, the audible passage of air through lungs and throat instead creating an exquisite tension in a manner now echoed by Lucinda Williams.

Her phrasing is not unlike Willie Nelson's, all ascending and descending scales with little in the way of embellishment.

This plaintive quality works best in traditional banjo ballad Katie Cruel, a spookily prescient tale of alienation in which Dalton inhabits the soul of a woman spurned, sounding taxed beyond her capacity.

Soul numbers When A Man Loves A Woman and How Sweet It Is are given a complete work-over, Dalton changing emphasis, melody and (at times) lyrics to lend a bluesy tone to the tracks.

And even when country-pop arrangements in Richard Manuel's In A Station and George Jones' Take Me turn towards the orthodox, Dalton's world-weary sultriness seeps through and colours everything.

Conventional, she ain't.