DOROTHY CARTER
Troubadour (reissue, 1976) DRAG CITY
The folk mystic’s finest hour revisited. By Rob Young
9/10
DorothyCarter: anomadic, chaoticlife
COURTESYCELESTECARTER
THAT elderly lady in the loft, who had no shower or kitchen, who threw parties for the bohemian crowd, where she played strange, ringing, twanging instruments with a faraway look in her eyes? Around New Orleans they said she lived in a hippy commune before hippies existed, or worked her passage as a cabin girl on a Mississippi steamboat, or ran away to a monastery in Mexico with an anarchist priest. They said she had two kids, that she had studied in Europe and travelled all over the world; some said she was secretly involved in a famous pop group over there, though none knew which; others warned not to speak ill of her, lest she cause her hammers to bludgeon the dulcimer of your heart.