Create the characters for an imaginary Wes Anderson movie in your head. Then combine all their backstories into one. You might end up with something akin to Dorothy Carter’s actual life. A child of the Great Depression, she started finding ways to be a bad-ass maverick before American society was really set up for that sort of thing, especially for women. She did a stint in a commune; She had a job on a Mississippi river boat; She co-founded a New York avant-garde art gallery and an experimental electro-acoustic band. She lived in a Berlin warehouse with no running water. Just to switch things up, she nearly became a nun at a Mexican monastery, and late in life, founded a shockingly successful classical crossover group.
Somewhere amid all that free-spirited tumult, Carter recorded two private-press albums that remain the core of her legacy: 1978’s Waillee Waillee, previously reissued in 2023; and her debut, 1976’s The Troubadour, newly resurrected by Drag City nearly five decades after its release.
“Trapezoids” was Carter’s blanket term for the family of instruments that spoke to her and that she, in turn, spoke through. The hammered dulcimer, the psaltery—if it was a decapitated triangle from medieval times with a surfeit of strings, she was all in. These axes form the crux of the Troubador, augmented by the drone of Sally Hilmer’s tambura and the Chinese, zither-like gugin (a.k.a. ch’in) plucking of electro-acoustic musical pioneer Constance Demby, who played with Carter in the aforementioned experimental crew Central Maine Power Music Company. Using centuries-old tools, these three women stir up a sound that seems simultaneously ancient and utterly unmoored in time. When Carter strikes her strings, folk and future merge. Meditation and momentum become siblings, navigating a road that encompasses the serenity of the setting and the slingshot-in-a-kaleidoscope rhythmic patterns.
The bulk of the material is drawn from a global grab-bag of musical traditions, including songs from Israel, Ukraine, Scotland, France, Appalachia, and more. Ultimately, they reach a common destination: A place where Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music makes a blood oath with psychedelia and minimalism to summon up a spirit that would resonate in any era. The most blatant mashups of ancient and modern arrive when Carter creates original settings for biblically sourced lyrics on “Make a Joyful Sound” and “Tree of Life.” The end result sounds so little like anything you expect from either “modern” music or spiritual scripture that it becomes a new musical universe unto itself.
Troubadour is predominantly instrumental, but when Carter opens her mouth—whether she’s taking the Old Testament into new territory or embracing the lovelorn metaphors of “The Cuckoo,” a traditional English folk song—things begin to feel even more like one of those old-school funhouse rides where you’re not sure whether to feel unnerved or enchanted and wind up a bit of both.
Carter left us way too early, dying in 2003 at the age of 68. Her solo discography would only achieve renown posthumously, but she got the last laugh on posterity while she was still among us. In 1996 she co-founded Mediaeval Babes with a group of women decades her junior, bringing a contemporary touch to medieval music and achieving major commercial success in the bargain. The rediscovery of Carter’s work is an ever-unfolding process; She mentored fellow one-offs like Danielle De Picciotto and Laraaji, and inspired plenty more. So far, her solo work has remained an essentially underground phenomenon. But the more her music circulates, the closer to the surface her legend gets.
