by Sandra Hale Schulman
News From Indian Country
“My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed.” - Bob Dylan
“She is my favorite female blues singer.” - Nick Cave
“Without a doubt, she is my favorite singer.” - Devendra Banhart
“She sure can sing the sh*t out of the blues.” - Fred Neil
Staring pensively down at her twelve string Gibson guitar, her long dark hair streaming down her back, Karen Dalton warbles her heartbreaking songs – part Billie Holiday, part Buffy Saint Marie, part like nothing and no one else. The YouTube clip of God Bless the Child and It Hurts Me Too from 1969 is haunting and complex and beautifully sad in a little girl lost way. Look it up now before she fades away again.
The late Karen Dalton has been the muse for countless folk rock geniuses, from Bob Dylan to Devendra Banhart, from Lucinda Williams to Joanna Newsom. Legendary singer Lacy J. Dalton actually adopted her hero’s surname as her own when she started her career in country music. Karen Dalton had that affect on people – her timeless, aching, blues-soaked, Native American spirit inspired both Dylan & The Band’s “Katie’s Been Gone” (on The Basement Tapes) and Nick Cave’s “When I First Came To Town” (from Henry’s Dream).
She only recorded two albums. Recorded over a six month period in 1970/71 at Bearsville, NY, near Woodstock, In My Own Time was Dalton’s only fully planned and realized studio album. The material was selected and crafted for her by producer/musician Harvey Brooks, the Renaissance man of rock-jazz who played bass on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and Miles’ Bitches Brew.
It features ten songs that reflected Dalton’s incredible ability to break just about anybody’s heart – from her spectral evocation of Joe Tate’s “One Night of Love,” to the dark tragedy of the traditional “Katie Cruel.” (When first I came to town/They brought me bottles plenty/And now they’ve changed their tune/They bring me the bottles empty/Oh that I was what I would be/That what I be that I am not/Here am I where I must be/Go where would I cannot.)
Known as a great interpreter of choice material, Dalton mastered both country and soul genres with deeply pining covers of George Jones’ “Take Me” and Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “How Sweet It Is.” She didn’t write her own songs, but every one she sang was spectrally transformed into her own. The label sent her on a European tour opening for Santana, where she was a hit in Paris and London.
From the exclusive liner notes by Lenny Kaye (“Nuggets,” Patti Smith Group): “Karen’s mother was full Cherokee, and told her that if your vibrations were right, plants would grow into your room, as Karen had grown onto the Village folk scene. She had the Beat spirit as well, the existential angst which felt life was dark, perpetually in pain, and that was how you became your art, if you were a real artist.”
“Karen was tall, willowy, had straight black hair, was long-waisted and slender, what we all wanted to look like,” Lacy J. Dalton said. And her blend of influences – the jazz of Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, the immersion of Nina Simone, the Appalachian keen of Jean Ritchie, the R&B and country that had to seep in as she made her way to New York from Oklahoma – created a “voice for the jaded ear.”
Fred Neil, who had first brought her to the attention of Capitol’s staff producer Nick Venet, wrote in his 1971 liner notes to In My Own Time: “Karen has been my favorite female vocalist as well as a heavy influence on my own style of singing since the early sixties. I first picked up on her one night in the village at the “Cock & Bull” (later the Bitter End). Her voice grabbed me immediately. She did “Blues On The Ceiling” (which is my song) with so much feeling that if she told me she had written it herself I would have believed her. After the set Dino Valenti took me up to Karen’s place. Later that night we jammed. Karen was like a letter from home. Her voice is so unique, to describe it would take a poet. All I can say is she sure can sing the shit out of the blues.”
Known as “Sweet Mother K.D.,” it is said that the song “Katie’s Been Gone” by The Band featuring Mohican Robbie Robertson from The Basement Tapes was written about her. (Katie’s been gone since the spring time;/She wrote one time ‘n sent her love/Katie’s been gone for such a long time now./I wonder what kind of love she’s thinkin’ of.)
Lucinda Williams listed In My Own Time as in her top ten of the year for Tower Pulse sometime in the late eighties.
To hear Karen Dalton sing “How Sweet It Is” or “When a Man Loves a Woman” is to hear the song anew. The Oklahoma-bred, New York City-based singer sustains what were previously just grace notes, moves the accents around, inverts the rhythms, and plays hide-and-seek with meter. Dalton even changes the lyrics at the end of “When a Man Loves a Woman,” fitting them to her female perspective. Her talent isn’t merely interpretive, but worldly and intimate: She takes these songs over completely, bending their melodies and meanings to fit her specific mood. And In My Own Time, her final album, has a very specific mood: These songs exalt love, but acknowledge its transitory, often tragic nature. Dalton gives herself over to its joys on “How Sweet It Is,” notes its passing on her majestic take on Richard Manuel’s “In a Station,” then sounds resigned on closer “Are You Leaving for the Country?” The album contains a narrative – a struggle between love and loss, the city and the country, joy and sorrow – but she sounds honestly conflicted, a jaded romantic trying to find her way home.
The phrase “in my own time” fairly sums up her life. She arrived in New York City with her daughter Abra in the early 1960s and became a fixture on the budding East Village folk scene – even sharing the stage with Bob Dylan. But Dalton moved around compulsively, played rarely and begrudgingly and mostly in someones living room, drank and did drugs heavily, and recorded almost never. She enjoyed playing privately with friends and hated the Billie Holliday comparison that dogged her throughout her entire life.
Producer Nick Venet reportedly had to trick her into recording songs for her first album, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best, released in 1969 and reissued by Koch in 1997, four years after her death. Dalton casts a subtle but powerful spell as she sings songs by Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, and Duke Ellington with minimal accompaniment. In My Own Time was released in 1971 on producer Harvey Brooks’ Just Sunshine label and has since been a collector’s treasure on vinyl. But after the modest success of the second record, “Her life took her in another direction,” says her bassist Harvey Brooks. “And she never came back to it.”
Compared to It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best, In My Own Time sounds a little more adventurous and lively with its full band and free-wheeling performances, seamlessly and playfully blending folk, country, rock, jazz, and soul. More than a dozen musicians coalesce into a loose, loopy backing band that knows when to push forward (“In a Station”), when to back off (“Take Me”), and when to let Dalton take front and center (pretty much always). In My Own Time has the laidback, lackadaisical vibe of a close-knit group of friends doing single takes around an inspired singer.
They play up the jazzy breeziness of “Take Me” and “Satisfied” and soak “In a Station” with multiple organs and rambling piano, giving the song a toe-tapping push showcasing Dalton’s rangy range.
Lacy J. Dalton remembers coming into Karen’s kitchen in Los Angeles sometime in the late 60s and finding Karen on the floor playing her 12 string, singing away next to a pot of baked beans she had just rustled up.
“Not old lady church beans, but hot and sweet, Cherokee style,” says Dalton.
“She was of the soil,” writes Lenny Kaye, “and not just because of her Native American background. Even the plants in her bedroom were aware of her life force, ivy curling through the window and over the sill.”
But Karen felt her music too privately and deeply, progressively losing her way, her music, and her home. By the early 90s she was living on the street in New York City, destitute, her frail health finally gone. Dalton helped her in and out of rehab, fetching her cat from purgatory in Pennsylvania and her guitar from a pawnshop.
“She was a canary in a coal mine,” says Dalton. “She loved the earth as a woman and Native American, …but she was desolate about what we were doing to it.”
In My Own Time features:
* First Time on CD + First Vinyl
Reissue
* Bonus EP Featuring Previously
Unreleased Tracks (Only Available on
iTunes starting Mid-Nov)
* Remastered from the Original Tapes
* CD includes 32pg deluxe booklet
* Exclusive liner notes from Lenny
Kaye, Nick Cave, and Devendra
Banhart
* Limited Edition 7” with Pic Sleeve
Also Available
On the Net:
www.lightintheattic.net
