The Carolyn Hester Coalition - The Carolyn Hester Coalition (Reissue) (1968/2008)

Carolyn Hester had been away from the recording scene for a few years when she re-emerged in the late 1960s as the centerpiece of the Carolyn Hester Coalition, a psychedelic- and folk-tinged rock group. It's hard to read this as anything but an attempt to keep up with the times on the part of someone who missed the boat that made folk and folk-rock a commercial proposition. Purism aside, this unexpected move wasn't a bad thing; Hester wasn't the greatest or most original folksinger anyway, so why not try something different? Her voice is still thin and almost unnaturally high, although not unappealingly so, on both rocked-up versions of folk songs she probably sang acoustically at one point ("East Virginia," "Let's Get Together") and tunes that are closer to fairly commercial psychedelic folk-rock. It's not the most organic combination, with trendy fuzz guitars flitting in and out of the arrangements from time to time. It's not bad, though, and the brooding cover of Ed McCurdy's anti-war song "Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream" is an effective interpretation of a significant composition that was overlooked by other folk-rock acts. Indeed the album, on that track and others, is more downcast than might be expected, Hester moaning at one point "half the world is starving, half the world is overfed, half take sleeping pills at night, half don't have a bed."