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Thursday, July 8, 2021

Karen Dalton is the forgotten queen of the folk scene - The Economist

IT IS THE 1960s, and in America folk music is booming. A young woman from the boondocks moves to New York, leaving behind an ex-husband and the child she could not care for. In the city her singular style marks her out as a star-in-waiting. Today, she is a legend.

That is the story of Joni Mitchell in 1967. Go back seven years, add a second divorce and a second child, and it’s also the story of Karen Dalton. Dalton never did become the star her peers believed she should be. Yet 50 years after the release of her second and final studio album, “In My Own Time”, she is indeed legendary—to a small but fast-widening circle.

By 2004 Dalton had been largely forgotten. Then in his memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One”, Bob Dylan described her as his favourite singer during his Greenwich Village days: she “had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed”. On the back of this brief précis, there was a surge of interest in Dalton. Her ardent admirers include Nick Cave, leader of the Bad Seeds, and Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group, both of whom have contributed sleeve notes to her reissued albums. The singer-songwriters Sharon Van Etten, Lucinda Williams and Julia Holter are fans; all of whom set Dalton’s words to music on a tribute album, “Remembering Mountains” (2015). British folk luminaries such as Joanna Newsom and Ríoghnach Connolly, who fronts The Breath, a Manchester-based duo, cite Dalton as an inspiration.

“I discovered her at a late-night hang-out with loads of other musicians,” says Ms Connolly, whose band recently released a cover of “Something On Your Mind”, the opening track of “In My Own Time”. “One of those when there’s a competition to see who can show off the most obscure people you know. I remember making everybody shut up once she came on. Some voices do grab you like that, where you have to hear every grain of them. Then I was addicted.” In a documentary film, “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time” (2020), Mr Cave tells a similar story, of hearing Dalton’s original version of that song in his car and having to pull over, moved to tears by its perfection.

Dalton was an extraordinary artist. Her vocal resemblance to Holiday is a superficial one; in spirit, although not in sound, she is closer to Nina Simone, being one of those rare performers who can inhabit any song so completely that it becomes their own. She never took her own compositions into a studio and she had to be coaxed or tricked into recording anyone else’s: her longtime champion, Fred Neil, a folk-pop pioneer, convinced her the tape was not rolling during the session that produced her LP of 1969, “It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best”. Although she was categorised as a folk singer, she could—as Neil noted—“sing the shit out of the blues”, while her unique phrasing and rhythm made her voice resemble a jazz instrument.

The title of her second album served as a wry in-joke; she sang very much in her own time, and it was up to any baffled accompanist to try to stay with her. “For session bands, I’d say she was a nightmare to work with, but also she was well within her rights,” Ms Connolly says. “She’s digging her heels in. The push and pull of that, I really enjoy. It tells me a lot about her as a person.”

By all accounts, Dalton was iron-willed, tough and proud. Her refusal to be led, artistically or in any other regard, did her career no favours at a time when there was scant room in the music business for women who wouldn’t play the game. Not only did she balk at recording, she often couldn’t bring herself to perform in public, and was only comfortable playing socially. She vanished from view after the release of “In My Own Time”, and thereafter contended with destitution, homelessness and addiction.

This, combined with the meagre factual record, means her legend has spilled over into myth. Where a single-minded, hard-living male artist with a turbulent love life might be a heroic figure, she is seen as a tragic one, doomed from the start: a half-Irish, half-Cherokee country girl possessed of both magical talent and terrible demons, whose records were contemporary failures, and who died on the street from AIDS-related illness in 1993, at the age of 55.

Yet that narrative doesn’t always fit the facts. Dalton’s mother had only distant Cherokee ancestry. “In My Own Time” was not a hit, but nor was it a flop; it was well received, and sold enough to earn back its substantial recording costs. She was not homeless when she died, and her friend, Peter Walker, a guitarist, has denied she was an alcoholic: “She struggled with poverty, more than any addiction or physical infirmity.”

As Ms Connolly notes, “You get distracted by the drama of her story. She didn’t have any front teeth, because she got in the middle of a row between two boyfriends, and they were knocked out of her. I thought, maybe that's why she got into opiates. She came to New York when she was 19, she’d already lost two marriages. She had her first baby when she was 15. That’s already a harrowing story. Not being able to support yourself, or your child, as a mother, is terrifying. This is a class story for me. Poverty is the biggest indicator of why she didn’t get where she should have done.”

Shed the myth, then, beguiling as it is, and what you’re left with is the music—which is immeasurably more so. Aside from a handful of patchy live recordings, there are only two albums to know Karen Dalton by. But they are enough to tell her work was sublime.

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Karen Dalton is the forgotten queen of the folk scene - The Economist
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