Lacy J. Dalton

Lacy J. Dalton emerged in the 1980s as a singular presence among female country vocalists, her eclectic and blues-tinged sound producing several chart entries powered by a raw, finely shaded delivery.

Born Jill Byrem in 1946 in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, she grew up surrounded by music. Early on she gravitated toward folk figures such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez while also absorbing country through her father. A short stint at Brigham Young University ended when she left to wander across the country; she reached Los Angeles and later settled in Santa Cruz, where she performed as a protest-minded folksinger. In the late 1960s she joined the Bay Area psychedelic rock group Office and, after marrying its manager, took the name Jill Croston—only to lose him in a swimming-pool accident. She later recast herself as a country artist under the stage name Lacy J. Dalton. Producer Billy Sherrill secured her a CBS contract after hearing a demo tape in 1979. The Top 20 single “Crazy Blue Eyes” earned her the CMA’s Best New Artist Award, and over the next three years she placed a strong sequence of singles on the charts, among them “Hard Times,” “Tennessee Waltz,” “Hillbilly Girl with the Blues,” the number-two hit “Takin’ It Easy,” “16th Avenue,” and “Everybody Makes Mistakes,” all but one reaching the Top Ten.

Her albums drew praise for their wide-ranging choice of material, most notably the self-titled debut. A 1983 reading of Roy Orbison’s “Dream Baby (How Long Must I Dream)” became her last Top Ten single, yet she remained with CBS until 1987. Her declining sales partly reflected deliberate stylistic experiments that embraced rock-leaning tracks on 1986’s Highway Diner—including the solid hit “Working Class Man”—along with blues and bluegrass excursions. She then moved to Capitol, issuing four albums through 1992. In 1999 she compiled the Wild Horse Crossing collection, which included several newly recorded tracks and appeared on her own Let ’Em Run foundation label, an organization dedicated to protecting wild horses of the West.