One of the more exciting album releases of February is Karen Dalton’s 1966, a series of recently exhumed reel-to-reel recordings the late singer made with her husband in a Colorado cabin way back in, yes, 1966. The recordings were apparently a rehearsal for a show, and they are sublime, so intimate that it sounds like the singer is sitting right there in the room with you. Dalton has long been one of our favorite ’60s singers, but sadly she never gained anywhere near the success she deserved, and even now she remains a largely overlooked talent. She’s not the only one, either — so here’s a selection of some of our favorite under-appreciated singers from in and around the Greenwich Village folk scene of the mid to late 1960s.

Karen Dalton

She could and arguably should have been as well-known as Janis Joplin, but instead Karen Dalton seems destined to be forever a footnote to the 1960s, championed by music aficionados but unknown to the general public. Part of the reason for this is that she only made two studio albums — 1969′s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best and 1971′s In My Own Time — largely because she disliked the recording process intensely. (She also apparently disliked the stage, which is perhaps why the home rehearsal recordings of 1966 are so good, capturing her in an environment where she was most comfortable.) And then, of course, there was her lifestyle — she drank heavily and abused drugs, and eventually drifted away from music completely. She died of AIDS in 1993.