Waillee Waillee

Soon after she crossed into her sixties, and just six years before she died, in New Orleans, in 2003, Dorothy Carter became an unlikely star. Her life had been a whirlwind: Born in New York but raised in Boston, she was a childhood piano whiz who forsook professional life for a vagabond existence scattered among convents in Mexico, stints as a steamboat deckhand on the Mississippi, and communal living and music-making in Maine. But in the mid ’90s, while Carter was sleeping on floors in Berlin, what already sounds like a fable took a stranger-than-Chaucer twist. On a lark, she proposed an all-women ensemble playing the very old music of Europe in modern settings. The result, Mediæval Bæbes, was an unexpected sensation, their extravagant anachronism selling hundreds of thousands of records and becoming popular enough to become an easy potshot for rock critics. Still, no less an éminence grise than John Cale produced their third album, not long before Carter left a group that even now remains a winkingly witchy European novelty.

However unlikely the Mediæval Bæbes seemed, they were, for Carter, a logical outgrowth of the music she’d pursued for decades. After trading the piano for the harp, she immersed herself in Renaissance madrigals, French chanson, and European ballads and hymns that had made the trip across the Atlantic. When Carter encountered the struck-and-plucked psaltery in New York in the ’70s, her cross-century song stockpile finally clicked: “I felt something like a strange recognition,” Carter later wrote of the moment. “THIS was the instrument I wanted to play.”

Her enthusiasm for the psaltery and its zither kin, the dulcimer, would last a lifetime. The imaginative music she made with them has long been hidden away on 1978’s Waillee Waillee, a private-press gem coveted by crate diggers and Discogs hounds that has at long last been reissued, salvaged from nearly five decades of obscurity. It is the start of a loving and stepwise quest to get her prescient records—and her compelling story, in book form—into public view at last. A seamless hybrid of clarion folk arrangements and coruscant drones, Waillee Waillee functions as a signal flare for that effort, its strange permutations articulating the shapes that acoustic and new-age music would take together in the coming years. A beautiful, sad, and bemused record, Carter’s opus is a joy to behold, as alive and vital now as it was then.

Atavistic songs, some of which predated her by almost a millennium, anchored Carter’s work. The Frenchman Adam de la Halle had been dead for nearly 700 years when Carter recorded her jubilant instrumental take of his love song “Robin M’aime,” her sparkling strings radiating off big, hollow drums like glitter beneath a full moon. Her “Celtic Medley” on the psaltery weaves together traditional Irish and Scottish ballads and waltzes, leaving notes hanging so that the overtones fade like morning dew.

Wrestled from its racist minstrel history, opener “The Squirrel Is a Funny Thing” suggests a naturalist’s sketchbook, images of a possum, rabbit, and bushy tails radiant above her dulcimer’s bright notes. If you were told this was a demo for The Milk-Eyed Mender, and that Joanna Newsom had a mild cold when she recorded it, you would not balk. And for all her age-old inclinations, Carter’s “Waillee Waillee”—a Scottish number from the 18th century, covered as “The Water Is Wide” by Bob Dylan a few years before Carter cut this—could have been cast from the rim of Laurel Canyon. It feels like a folk-rock trance, gently tugging past toward present.

In fact, Carter was invested not just in history and conservation but also in the frontiers of sound around her. She was a mentor to a young Laraaji, and long before she made Waillee Waillee, she performed with the Central Maine Power Music Company of artist Robert Rutman, whose steel cellos made him something of a high-art forebear to industrial music. Rutman plays that droning beast and a few other of his sculptural contraptions on closer “Tree of Life,” where Carter intones a Jewish hymn in slow circles through his long tones. Its rapturous sweep recalls Bardo Pond and Growing, bands whose members were children, at most, at that point. And on her own “Summer Rhapsody,” Carter’s ecstatic hammered dulcimer lines sprint across the animalistic moans of Rutman’s bow chime. It suggests the sun rising high above yesterday’s snowstorm, the world becoming a blinding white, a wintry gamelan. The continuous piano music of Lubomyr Melnyk would eventually feel this way, as would the guitar majesty of James Blackshaw.

So often in the world of reissues, records are dubbed proto-something—proto-garage, proto-rap, proto-trance. But what is most striking about Waillee Waillee is the way it feels like the thing itself, not some wispy intimation of the freak-folk, New Weird America, or international underground oddities that would emerge over the next several decades. It is vivid and fully realized, finding the strands connecting simple songs about the woods and love to abstractions that aim for transcendence, then climbing them like a Jacob’s ladder toward wonder. It’s mostly surprising that it’s taken until 2023 for this sublime music to return to circulation, long after the days of Devendra Banhart’s Gnomonsong label, Espers’ communal haze, or Arthur Magazine’s reign of heady expertise, all of which began around the time of Carter’s death. Waillee Waillee got to many of the same elevated planes first, and it still moves just like a time machine.

Dorothy Carter: Waillee Waillee

$27 at Rough Trade