| Format: | LP |
| Availability: | In stock |
Drag City presents the first official reissue of Dorothy Carter’s 1976 album debut, her folk-music exegesis, Troubadour. In her lifetime, Dorothy, a self-made traveling musician and folklorist, brought forth masterful evocations on hammered dulcimer and psaltery from a myriad of times and places. Her music was played, produced and sold outside of that era’s mainstream music distribution.
It’s been 20 years since Dorothy’s passing – but thanks to last year’s reissue of her second album, Waillee Waillee (1978), and this edition of Troubadour, her music is surging forward ever more powerfully. 2035 will mark the centennial of her birth; the mythos and arcana she pursued in relative obscurity is now inspiring an audience larger than Dorothy ever knew. At the time of that centennial, some will, no doubt, look back to the good old days of the early ‘20s, when they first heard her music.
Others, like Troubadour reissue producer Eric Demby, can look back to a childhood spent off the grid: the early ‘70s in rural Maine, and later on, in Boston - wherever his freewheeling father brought the family, at one point or another, there too was Dorothy, as she lived and breathed, playing her hammered dulcimer. Her presence was always friendly and warm, yet “ethereal” – her mind far away, her focus seemingly deep within the music, the instruments and the world from which they’d come.
As for the world from which she came: following a childhood spent around New England, Dorothy traveled abroad for her higher education. She found herself in the late 1950s in Mexico, intent on becoming a nun at the Cuernavaca monastery. Instead, she fell in with a group of expats including David Demby (Eric’s father), his soon-to-be-wife Constance (her moment of New Age musical breakthrough still three decades hence) and aspiring artist and musician Bob Rutman. These were her people, looking for their place in the world.
From Mexico City, they made it back up to New York, to Greenwich Village, where Rutman opened an art and “happenings” gallery while Dorothy delved deep into the mystic things of traditional music and sounds, living the bohemian life while bringing up two dearly-loved children with her itinerant lifestyle.
As the 60s became the 70s, Eric recalls,
“She was always coming from somewhere or on her way somewhere else, transporting instruments and folklore from Eastern Europe, Appalachia, and beyond that felt ancient and unearthed, which she would channel into our universe.”
The early ‘70s found everyone living up on the farm up in rural Maine; it was here that Rutman, Constance, Dorothy and some others formed Central Maine Power Company, a troupe of almost feral improvisers playing on a combination of self-made and found instruments, with live video feedback to boot. Self-documentation wasn’t on their minds; simply BEING was enough. And so they were for several years, playing at planetariums around the northeast and even MoMA and the nascent World Trade towers.
In 1976, Dorothy had been playing music for decades, but had yet to record any of it. That year, she went to Cambridge’s Studio B with Rutman and friend Steve Baer at the console. Constance and Sally Hilmer accompanied her. The performances captured there were released later that year as Troubadour. In addition to hammered dulcimer and psaltery, Dorothy played the flute and sang. She chose songs from all over: Appalachian folk tunes, old and ancient psalms and hymns, Scottish, Irish, French and Israeli melodies, with a few of her own songs for good measure.
They all flow together effortlessly under Dorothy and friends’ hands in a syncretic space that we can identify today as a garden of world musics – a highly energized, alternately meditative and proselytic recital whose vitality has only burgeoned in the decades since it appeared. As it should be: the music of Dorothy Carter is akin to a portal, linking her and us with the eternal.
This edition of Troubadour reproduces the original album package, adding an insert adorned with additional photos of Dorothy and her collection of instruments, as well as notes from Eric Demby exploring the era – his childhood – from a vantage point of some 50 years. This reissue is a long-held family dream come true, and it is dedicated in loving memory to Bob Rutman, Constance Demby, David Demby and Dorothy Carter.
