Dalton, Lacy J.

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Lacy J. Dalton

Singer

With hard-luck songs that reflected her real-life experience, Lacy J. Dalton became one of the most popular “outlaw” country singer of the early 1980s. After winning a Country Music Association Award as Best New Female Vocalist in 1979, she released a series of albums that were both commercial and critical successes. A popular concert attraction as well, Dalton sometimes played over 300 dates a year throughout the 1980s and released an album of original material almost every year. Dalton slowed her pace somewhat in the 1990s as she entered her fourth decade in the music business. Settling in Nevada, she continued to record and perform; in 1999 she established the Let ’em Ride Foundation, an organization devoted to helping save wild horses.

The singer later known as Lacy J. Dalton was born Jill Byrem on October 13, 1948, in Bloomsburg, a small town in eastern Pennsylvania’s mining country. Her father, who played the guitar, mandolin, and banjo, worked as a hunting guide on a nature preserve; her mother was a waitress and bartender. Both parents enjoyed singing country songs. As she later recalled in an interview with Time in 1980, “I loved the songs more than the singing. Country music is a storytelling art.” Despite her appreciation of music, Dalton decided to study art at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah after she finished high school. She completed one year at BYU before deciding that her artistic talent was not enough for a career in the field. She moved Minnesota, where she worked as a short-order cook and began singing with some local folk musicians. It was the beginning of a career in music, although it took more than a decade for Dalton to sign a recording contract.

Dalton’s parents insisted that she come home to Pennsylvania. She complied, but left soon afterward for New York City’s Greenwich Village, a vibrant center of the folk-music scene in the mid-1960s. While performing in coffeehouses and other small venues, Dalton met John Crosston, who became her partner and the manager of Office, a band that Dalton fronted. The couple moved to Santa Cruz, California, in 1967 and later spent some time in Los Angeles, where they tried to get Office’s career off the ground. The attempt failed and the band broke up, but Dalton and Crosston stayed together. They married around 1971 and had a son, Adam. Crosston was paralyzed in a freak accident in 1974 when he collided with another swimmer in a pool. He died in 1977, leaving the widowed Dalton to support their child by working as a cook in Santa Cruz while picking up singing gigs when she had the time.

Her personal life was also rocky after Crosston’s death. “I felt emotionally bankrupt,” she told People in December of 1980, “but I didn’t get depressed. I was delighted to have Adam. I tried some relationships, but I was choosing men who couldn’t sustain them. I guess I didn’t really want them to work out.” Dalton later turned the experiences into fodder for the singles “Crazy Blue Eyes” and “Losing Kind of Love,” hard-luck songs that she cowrote for her debut album. Dalton eventually

For the Record…

Born Jill Byrem on October 13, 1948, in Blooms-burg, PA; married John Crosston, c. 1971 (died, 1977); married Aaron Anderson; children: (with Crosston) Adam. Education: Studied at Brigham Young University, Utah.

Sang in clubs in Minnesota, New York City, and California, late 1960s; signed recording contract with Columbia Records, 1979; released eleven albums on Columbia through 1991; signed with Liberty, 1992, released two albums; started the Let ’em Run Foundation, 1999.

Awards: Country Music Association, Best New Female Vocalist, 1979.

Addresses: Office—Lacy J. Dalton Productions, P.O. Box 18163, Reno, NV 89511. Website— Lacy J. Dalton Official Website: http://www.lacyjdalton.com.

began a lengthy relationship with John Fitzgerald, who was in the audience at one of her local shows, and began setting her sights on restarting her music career.

With the help of some friends, Dalton put together a demo tape that highlighted her musical range as well as her distinctive voice. The tape made its way to CBS/Columbia Records producer Billy Sherrill, best known for his work with country superstar Tammy Wynette. Like Wynette, Dalton had a rich emotional delivery that blended power and vulnerability. The hard-luck stories contained in many of her songs put Dalton into the “country outlaw” category, despite the blues, folk, bluegrass, and even big-band influences in her music. A People music critic best described her sound in a 1983 review, noting: “Dalton is not particularly fond of being labeled, but if she isn’t a country-rock singer, there never will be one. And if she isn’t a terrific country-folk singer, there never has been one.”

At Sherrill’s behest, CBS offered her a contract; he also urged her to take a new name, and she picked “Lacy,” a name she liked, and “Dalton,” the last name of a friend. The “J.” stood for her original name, Jill. With her new name and top-notch producer, her debut album, Lacy J. Dalton, was a critical and commercial success that helped her win the Country Music Association’s Best New Female Vocalist Award in 1979. As New York Times writer John Rockwell noted in a 1980 review, “We live in a time that prizes strong women performers, a trend that has begun to permeate even the still, calm, conservative waters of country music… And of all the new women singers of this sort, about the most promising is Lacy J. Dalton.”

In the 1980s Dalton regularly played over 300 concert dates a year, often opening for Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, and Hank Williams, Jr. She also released a string of albums: Hard Times came out in 1980, followed by Takin’ It Easy in 1981, and 16th Avenue in 1982. The title track from 16th Avenue, a song about musicians struggling to make it in Nashville, became the biggest hit of her career. In 1983 Dalton released Dream Baby, which contained a cover version of Roy Orbison’s hit of the same name. A Greatest Hits collection followed that same year, followed by a two-year hiatus from the recording studio. As Dalton explained in a Billboard interview to promote the release of her 1985 album Can’t Run Away from Your Heart, “Columbia was insisting that I change producers. I didn’t want to. I’d worked with Billy [Sherrill] ever since he discovered me on ’Crazy Blue Eyes,’ and we’d had hits like ’16th Avenue’ together. I didn’t think it was fair for me to switch.”

Dalton stayed with the Columbia label through four more albums: 1986’s I Love Country, the 1987 compilation album Blue-Eyed Blues; Lacy J. in 1990; and Crazy Love in 1991. In 1992 she switched to the Liberty label for Chains on the Wind and released another greatest-hits collection on the label in 1993. Still a popular concert performer, Dalton’s popularity on the country charts had long since been supplanted by more pop-oriented female artists such as Barbara Mandrell, Reba Mclntyre, the Judds, and later, Shania Twain.

A lengthy relationship with her tour manager, Aaron Anderson, resulted in Dalton’s second marriage; the couple relocated to Reno, Nevada in 1998. In 1999 they established the Let ’em Run Foundation, an organization devoted to helping save wild horses in Nevada’s Virginia Range from abuse and extinction. The foundation also worked to establish a preserve in Nevada as a free-range area for wild horses. In 1999 Dalton released Wild Horse Crossing, a collaborative effort and fund-raising effort for the Let ’em Ride Foundation. Dalton also played numerous benefit shows on behalf of the foundation and in May of 2000 performed as the title character in the musical Annie, Get Your Gun in a series of six performances at the Nevada Shakespeare Festival.