Karen Dalton

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Karen Dalton (born July 19, 1937 in Enid (Oklahoma) , USA as Karen Cariker , † March 19, 1993 in New York State , USA) was an American folk singer , guitar and banjo player who was involved in the Greenwich Village folk scene in the 1960s, best known for her collaborations with Fred Neil , Tim Hardin , Bob Dylan and the Holy Modal Rounders . Her bluesy voice, expressing Weltschmerz, is often compared to that of jazz icon Billie Holiday . She struggled with drugs and alcohol all her life.

Life

Karen Cariker came from a simple background. Her father was Irish, her mother Cherokee . Very young, around 1953/54, she gave birth to her first child, a son named Lee, who was raised by his grandmother. Two years later, Karen was married to one of her college teachers, had a daughter, and was now called Dalton. The marriage did not last long.

Around 1960, Karen Dalton appeared with her daughter Abra for the first time in New York's bohemian Greenwich Village, where she made her living performing in the numerous bars and music pubs. Here she met the folk singer Richard Tucker, with whom she was married from 1960 to 1965. After this marriage also broke up and Dalton had trundled through the USA and Mexico for a few years, she returned to New York at the end of the 1960s, where she recorded her first album It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best in 1969 .

After Dalton's second album In My Own Time was released in 1971 , the effects of her addiction to heroin , speed and alcohol became more and more apparent. Their appearances became less and more irregular, a planned further album was never realized. For the last years of her life she lived in a trailer at Hurley , near Woodstock, New York state, where she died in March 1993 of an AIDS infection.

Reception and effect

Dalton's albums received positive reviews across the board, but hardly sold. One reason for this was probably that Dalton did not fit into the singer-songwriter scheme that was popular in the late 1960s . She was primarily an interpreter, she did not write music and lyrics herself. Despite the commercial failure, Dalton was and is highly valued in music circles. Several well-known colleagues refer to Dalton as one of their favorite musicians or admit that her work has a greater or lesser influence on their own musical development.

Probably the best known admirer of Dalton is Bob Dylan, who performed several times with Dalton during his time in Greenwich Village. In his autobiographical work Chronicles , he remembers Dalton as “my favorite singer in the place” and continues: “Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed .” Whether the song Katie's Been Gone by Dylan's longtime Backing band The Band actually refers to Dalton ( KD = Katie ) is unclear.

Nick Cave calls Dalton his all-time favorite blues singer and her version of Something On Your Mind as the most extraordinary vocal performance he has ever heard ( "the most extraordinary vocal I've ever heard" ). He particularly values ​​her talent as an interpreter, the ability to make strange songs her own. Caves song When I First Came To Town (from the album Henry's Dream ) is inspired by Dalton's take on the traditional Katie Cruel .

The voice of psychedelic folk singer Devendra Banhart has been compared to that of Karen Dalton. He himself describes Karen Dalton as one of his inspirations: "She is one of the most amazing musicians in the universe."

Country singer Lacy J. Dalton says she chose her stage name "Dalton" because of her admiration for Karen Dalton.

Discography

  • It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best (1969)
  • In My Own Time (1971)
  • Cotton Eyed Joe (The Loop Tapes, Live In Boulder 1962) (2007)
  • Green Rocky Road (The Loop Tapes, Pine Street Recordings) (2008)

It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best was released on CD in 1997 by Koch Records. In 2006 there was a new edition by Megaphone with the addition of a DVD with archive footage.

Also in 2006, Light In The Attic Records released In My Own Time on CD and vinyl reissue.

literature

  • Peter Stampfel et al .: Text accompanying the CD edition of It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best. Koch Records KOC-CD-7918, 1997. Reprinted on Megaphone CD MEGA 10, 2006.
  • Diverse: Text accompanying the CD edition of In My Own Time. Light In The Attic Records LITA 022, 2006.
  • All Music Guide (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ LOST AND FOUND: KAREN DALTON by Alan Bisbort
  2. ^ Bob Dylan: Chronicles, Volume One. Simon & Schuster, New York 2004.
  3. ↑ Nick Cave: An Understanding of Sorrow. In: In My Own Time , CD booklet.
  4. ↑ Jennifer Kelly: Devendra Banhart: Interview in the online magazine "Splendid". In: archive.today. September 18, 2012, archived from the original on February 23, 2012 ; accessed on June 2, 2019 .

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Dalton, Karen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Cariker, Karen (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American folk singer, guitar and banjo player
DATE OF BIRTH July 19, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH Enid, Oklahoma , USA
DATE OF DEATH March 19, 1993
Place of death New York , USA