Karen Dalton

Oklahoma and Greenwich Village

Karen Dalton was born Jean Karen Cariker on July 19, 1937 and raised in Enid, Oklahoma, and lived in Stillwater, Oklahoma and Lawrence, Kansas. Her birthplace is disputed: Wikipedia says Bonham, Texas, while MusicBrainz and a Substack essay say Enid. Divorced twice by the age of 21, she moved to Greenwich Village in the early 1960s with a 12-string guitar, a banjo and at least one of her two children.

In the Village she sang with Fred Neil, Richard Tucker, who later became her husband, and Tim Hardin, and was among the first to sing Hardin's "Reason to Believe". She was a regular at Cafe Wha?. Bob Dylan sometimes backed her on harmonica, and in Chronicles: Volume One he wrote that she had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed. She is said to have disliked the Holiday comparison, naming Bessie Smith as a bigger influence, and she was reluctant to sing her own songs. Her doorbell on Sullivan Street read "K.T. Kruel".

Two albums

Her debut, It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best, came out on Capitol in 1969, produced by Nick Venet at the Record Plant in New York. By the account in Wikipedia, Venet failed to record her until he invited Fred Neil to a session, and they got takes by letting her think the tape was not rolling, with most tracks cut in one take on one night. It has covers of Neil, Hardin, Lead Belly and Leroy Carr, and AllMusic gives it four and a half stars. Peter Stampfel's liner note for the 1997 Koch reissue called her the only folk singer he ever met with an authentic folk background.

The second, In My Own Time, came out in 1971 on Michael Lang's Just Sunshine label, and was her last in her lifetime. Dalton lived in a mining cabin in Summerville, Colorado with Tucker and their daughter, and made home reel-to-reel recordings there, released in 2012 as 1966. In 1969 she played Cafe au Go-Go in New York and Ledbetter's in Los Angeles, and in the spring of 1971 toured Europe, including Hammersmith Odeon in London on May 8 and 9. After In My Own Time did not sell she withdrew from public life, living in a mobile home near Hurley, outside Woodstock. She died on March 19, 1993 in Hurley, aged 55.

After her death

Posthumous releases include the 1962 live Cotton Eyed Joe (2007), Green Rocky Road (2008, home recordings from about 1962 and 1963), 1966 (2012), the tribute Remembering Mountains (2015, with Patty Griffin, Lucinda Williams, Sharon Van Etten and Julia Holter, among others) and Shuckin' Sugar (2022). Light in the Attic reissued In My Own Time in 2006, with liner notes by Devendra Banhart, and issued a 50th anniversary edition in March 2022. The documentary Karen Dalton: In My Own Time premiered at DOC NYC in November 2020, with a score by Julia Holter and Angel Olsen reading her journals. Nick Cave, Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom are among those who cite her, and the country singer Lacy J. Dalton took her surname as a tribute.