Karen Dalton

Karen Dalton once ranked among the most commanding performers of the folk movement in '60s New York City before being rediscovered by a new generation of idiosyncratic storytellers in the 21st century. Born in Texas in 1937 and raised in Oklahoma, she possessed a folk music pedigree that was significantly more authentic than that of many of her fellow New York transplants, having learned her signature accompanying instruments—the banjo and the 12-string guitar—as a teenager. Her free and rough-hewn voice made her both an awe-inspiring and polarising presence on the Greenwich Village scene. Her debut, 1969’s It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, documents what one imagines might have been a typical club set for her, drawing together traditional music, friends’ music and contemporary pop songs, all filtered through her wholly unique interpretative lens. In My Own Time (1971) was a more lovingly produced and considered effort that included soul covers, mournful traditionals and music written expressly for her (“Something On Your Mind”, by Dino Valenti). After her second effort showed no commercial prospects, Dalton retreated from the music industry, losing the battle against her lifelong issues with addiction and eventually contracting AIDS; she died in 1993. Her reputation has grown over time through various reissues of her once-obscure LPs and through tributes from both contemporaries (Bob Dylan, Fred Neil) and acolytes (Lucinda Williams, Joanna Newsom).