Image from GinaMurrell1 twitter
While recovering from a motorcycle accident, Bob Dylan recorded the album The Basement Tapes. Being Dylan, we could pick up any song from that album and listen to an amazing story, and one of those songs, Katie's Been Gone, is said to be about our protagonist, Karen Dalton. Dylan met Dalton in a New York cafe called Cafe Wha?, and in his book Chronicles 1 had this to say about her:
My favourite singer鈥as Karen Dalton. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday and played guitar like Jimmy Reed鈥 sang with her a couple of times
Karen Dalton was said to be born in Oklahoma and having Cherokee heritage, probably as a marketing strategy, in reality, she was Irish, and as so, she sang and she drank. She was also said to be too bluesy for folk lovers and too folky to blues lovers, a trait that wouldn't help her much. She didn't wait too long to find hardships, at 21 she had divorced 3 times and had 2 children. At that time she decided to leave everything, children included, to be an errant singer through America, maybe dreaming of returning one day.
Her journey leads her to a life of cheap wine and heroine, a life that, like countless other times, went well with her voice, beautiful and hurt, not very recommended for days in which you just want to be happy.
Her first album happens thanks to the owner (and also star) of the Cafe Wha?, Fred Neil in 1969. It's called It's so hard to tell who's gonna love you the best and you can see why Dylan compared her with Billie Holiday, as Dalton can be described as a folk version of the singer. It's worth noting that the album doesn't contain a single original song from Dalton, she said that why would she write something when others had already written how she felt. What she did, and did really well, was singing those lyrics with her voice and her pain.
In 1971 she released her second album, this one much less amateur thanks to the help of a producer that had worked with Dylan. Sadly, this would also be her last. She died in 1993 at the age of 56 with little, if any, recognition. 22 years after recording for the last time.
But it's not the end of the story of Karen Dalton, even though she never sang an original song she wrote many during her last years. A folk guitarist and good friend of hers, Peter Walker, was by her side and took good care of her writings, which he published in 2014 in the book called Karen Dalton Songs Poems and Writings. This inspired producer Tompkins Square to gather 11 female singers to record this song, and published them under the name of Remembering Mountains.
I want to finish this post by recommending one of Dalton's song, Little Bit of Rain. It can be found in her first album and the original author is precisely the producer of that very album, Fred Neil. It's a predictably melancholic song that starts with a very simple bass, after a little bit Karen Dalton joins in with her 12 strings guitar and shortly after an electric guitar with, again, very simple chords. Meanwhile, the drums can be heard very timidly in the background, trying to distract as little as possible from the perfect environment the melody sets up for Karen's voice, so it can shine with all its purity, softness and pain.
