Unfortunately, there's been more chatter about Karen Dalton over the past few years than there ever was in her short lifetime. A Greenwich Village folkie by way of Oklahoma, Dalton wowed the likes of Bob Dylan in her heyday. In Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, he reminisces on the Café Wha? scene and Karen Dalton in particular: My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry. I'd actually met her before, run across her the previous summer outside of Denver in a mountain pass town in a folk club. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it. I sang with her a couple of times.
More recently, Devendra Banhart has been doing his best to turn a new generation onto Dalton (via Splendid): I've really got no idea why Karen Dalton is unknown. She is one of the most amazing musicians in the universe. Forget about the amount of soul she's got -- she's got the most far-out, fucked up, amazing soul. She's the most soulful singer in the universe. But the technicalities...her timing and her phrasing is perfect. It's beyond perfect. You can't even try to imitate it because it's like beyond, it's brilliant.
Curiously, Dalton (or prospective record labels) didn't strike while the iron was hot and her first album, It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best, didn't come out until 1969—followed in 1971 by In My Own Time. Our featured video is a live version of a song from her debut album and according to the YouTube description is from a French documentary filmed in New York in 1969.
Karen Dalton - "It Hurts Me Too":
