I was listening to some music on last.fm today and a song came on with a voice so haunting and unusual I had to stop what I was doing and see who it was. It was a 1960's song of Karen Dalton who was something of an icon in her heyday of the Greenwich Village scene of the 1960's.
A 2008 NPR story told of how she was one of Bob Dylan's favorite singers.
Dalton could sound like Billie Holiday, and she had the striking beauty of a Walker Evans dustbowl portrait. Bob Dylan called her his favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s.
She never enjoyed much commercial success, but her emotional performances and tragic life story continue to attract new fans. Fifteen years after her death, her music has never been more popular.
Laura Dawlton, in a 2007 Guardian piece, told much about her tragic life. Although others from her genre Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Pete Singer went on to great commercial success she only recorded two albums with the last one being released many years after her death.
Although Dalton was in the right place at the right time, hanging with the right people and boasted a rare talent, she was also self-destructive. She drank heavily, used drugs and had a tendency to disappear on a whim. She played only cover versions, and her decision to not play her own material in an era that belonged to singer-songwriters perhaps also hindered her success. She was uncomfortable performing live, and she also loathed recording - It's So Hard to Tell You Who's Going to Love You the Best was only recorded because Fred Neil fooled her into believing the tape wasn't rolling.
The follow-up, In My Own Time, was recorded at Bearsville studio, near Woodstock in upstate New York, which was set up by Bob Dylans's manager, Albert Grossman. In order to make herself feel more at ease with recording, Dalton returned to Oklahoma to fetch her two teenage children, her dog and, reputedly, her horse, before going to the studio. Producer Harvey Brooks, who had played bass on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, recalls the sessions as fraught. "The fact that she wasn't a writer meant that we really had to create something for her," he says. "It was a lot of work, because her emotional personality had to be dealt with every step of the way. And respected.
In her last years the once beautiful hippie icon was a homeless addict with AIDS on the streets of New York City before her death in 1993.
A rare 1970 video recorded at her cabin in Colorado
A rare recording of "Ribbon Bow"
One of her most haunting tunes.
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