The Life and Legacy of a Forgotten Folk Singer

Acts like Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Hecuba, and Sufjan Stevens—a whole family of contemporary musicians of congenial tastes, really—are both obsessed with Karen Dalton and indebted to her. Bob Dylan called her his “favorite singer in the place” in his autobiography. So why do so few know about her?

Born in Enid, Okla., Dalton was married and divorced twice before the age of 21. It was not long until she made her way to Greenwich Village at a time when residence all but required one to be a bard or a banjo player. She was beautiful, too. “Karen was tall, willowy, had straight black hair, was long-waisted and slender, what we all wanted to look like,” Lacy J. Dalton, a self-described “hard-luck” chanteuse and former fellow West Villager, has said. She could certainly sing and strum the banjo (and a 12-string Gibson guitar to boot), but Karen Dalton didn’t pen a single track on either of the two albums she managed to record in her lifetime. Fully gripped by the cult of the Singer-Songwriter—the belief that one needed to be both a vocalist and a lyricist in order to be great (or even good)—and the perception that Dalton was a mere cover artist, conventional folk musicians of the day appreciated the true poetry of her music.

Despite her debilitating addiction to hard drugs and her premature AIDS-related death, the real tragedy of Karen Dalton’s life may have been that she was seen as an interpreter when she was more really a divine medium between those she sang for and the unsounded depths of a tune. She did not merely elucidate the fuller substance of a song or discover the unplumbed; she inhabited the songs she commandeered and established distinctly new profundities by weaving both deeply personal and universal narratives into her work.

Upon repeated listening to her second and final album, 1971’s “In My Own Time,” I felt at times as though Dalton’s voice were somehow not her own—as if it were instead the collected reincarnations of ancient, yellowed experiences, the culmination and distillation of a million cornmeal-flavored caterwauls that once blared out across an America long since passed away.

“She was of the old beat generation that felt you had to be burning the candle both ends and dying of hunger to call yourself an artist,” Lacy J. Dalton said in an interview with The Guardian. “I’ve always called them canaries in the coalmine, because they were in some ways hypersensitive to what was going on in the world. They were expressing their feelings of powerlessness and they felt they should live, do drugs, drink, whatever to take the pain away.” Like Bessie Smith, when Dalton sang a song it seemed to first require a process of self-immolation, the details of which are not so much hidden by the beauty of the song as they are softened by it.

Perhaps this is why the idea of Dalton—what she represents, as opposed to who she was—feels so relatable. There is something in her languorous pronunciation of consonants—L’s and R’s morph into disyllabic sounds—that draws nebulous, martyrizing declarations out of those who knew her well and those who didn’t. “There was no fire behind her,” bass player and producer Harvey Brooks told NPR in reference to her attempts at studio recording. “By the time the fire came, her personal fire was not up to it.”

For those anecdote- and detail-obsessed music enthusiasts—those who pride themselves on their familiarity with every Dylan bootleg in existence or every reference to Tupac’s untimely death on every album he ever released—elliptical statements like this can allow the listener to imagine whatever biography they deem most fitting for her. Given that so little is known about her, and no recorded interviews with her exist, there is little to check or discourage such extrapolations.

I thought of this recently when listening to “Something On Your Mind,” a song she sings with both a fragility akin to Billie Holliday in her most heroin-addled years and a strength that rivals Lady Day at her best. I realized that knowing the specifics of Karen Dalton’s life are not as essential as they might be for another artist, and filling in the gaps in my image of her was a potential waste of time, for her music is just that masterful—it contextualizes itself. It was then that I realized just how relevant, how modern her music is and will be.

Like many, I find so much of that certain kind of folk—songs of unrealized or unrealizable ideas, only appreciated by the sexagenarians who penned them and the sophomore liberal art students longing for their own Old World Underground—so beguilingly and simultaneously naïve, distant, square, and off-putting.

Karen Dalton may be called a folk musician, but really, I think she just hung out with a fair number of people who thought of themselves as folk singers.

Rollingstone.com and rhapsody.com both have free streams of Dalton’s second and most accessible album, as well as her 1969 debut album “It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best.” While once the prized secret possession of Formers—that is, former writers at now-defunct music magazines, former proprietors of coffee shops that keeled over and died as soon as disco came about—the aforementioned coterie of contemporary musicians are more than indicative of not only Dalton’s relevance, but also the need to know about her.

—Columnist Ruben L. Davis can be reached at rldavis@fas.harvard.edu.