Karen Dalton

Karen Dalton, a cult vocalist as well as a skilled 12-string guitarist and banjo player from the New York folk revival of the 1960s, has stayed known to only a small circle even though she counted Bob Dylan and Fred Neil among her circle of acquaintances. Limited visibility arose partly from her infrequent trips to the studio, since she released just one album during the 1960s and that set finally appeared in 1969 long after she had already become familiar on the Greenwich Village circuit from the decade’s outset. Another factor was her preference for interpreting other writers’ material rather than recording songs she had composed herself. Her singing, often likened to Billie Holiday yet marked by a rural twang, struck pop listeners as too idiosyncratic and remote. Producer Nik Venet, who oversaw her first album, went so far as to state in Goldmine, “She was very much like Billie Holiday. Let me say this, she wasn’t Billie Holiday but she had that phrasing Holiday had and she was a remarkable one-of-a-kind type of thing.... Unfortunately, it’s an acquired taste, you really have to look for the music.”

Raised in Oklahoma, Dalton settled in New York around 1960. Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, who played in her backup band during the early ’70s, observed in the liner notes to the CD reissue of her debut that “she was the only folk singer I ever met with an authentic ‘folk’ background. She came to the folk music scene under her own steam, as opposed to being ‘discovered’ and introduced to it by people already involved in it.” A photograph taken in February 1961, later reproduced on the back cover of the reissued It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, shows Dalton performing with Fred Neil and Bob Dylan, who at the time remained scarcely recognized. Unlike those friends she never landed a recording contract and instead spent much of the following period traveling across North America.

Unease in the studio shaped the making of her Capitol album It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, which came together after Nik Venet, having attempted several times without success to record her, asked her to sit in on a Fred Neil session. He requested she perform Neil’s “Little Bit of Rain” simply as a favor for his own collection, yet the request expanded into a complete album cut in that one session, most tracks finished in a single take. In the early ’70s she made one further album, produced by Harvey Brooks, who had appeared on certain 1960s Dylan sessions. Recorded at Bearsville Studios in Woodstock, the set, like her debut, mixed traditional folk pieces, blues numbers, covers of soul hits (“When a Man Loves a Woman,” “How Sweet It Is”), and newer songs by singer-songwriters such as Dino Valente and the Band’s Richard Manuel. The Band’s “Katie’s Been Gone,” featured on The Basement Tapes, is rumored to refer to Dalton.