It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best

Karen Dalton

album cover

How Did the World Miss Her?

Karen Dalton (1938-1993) was a denizen of the Greenwich Village folk scene in the early '60s. A singer and guitarist, she made two records late in the decade and then promptly vanished, becoming a footnote figure remembered only by the few who were captivated by her intense, room-hushing performance style. One of those was Bob Dylan. In the first volume of his memoir Chronicles, he writes, "Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday's and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it."

This, Dalton's debut, falls in the rather large cracks between folk, jazz, and blues. It is an oddly perfect listening experience. A singer of uncommon emotional control, Dalton writes gut-level direct songs that prefigure the genre-blurring efforts of Lucinda Williams and the Americana songwriters of the 1990s. Yes, the half-Irish, half-Cherokee singer has a timbre and tone that echo Holiday, but she's got her own ideas about how to develop a mood. Phrasing in detached bursts, she creates a zone of placidness, a quiet little world in which her interpretations flourish on their own schedule. At times she sounds like she's being coy about the blues—as though she recognizes just how far toward the form's flatted thirds and outright moans she can go before sounding like an imitator.

Dalton didn't write her own songs—some have suggested that her lack of original material, coupled with a deep apprehension over recording, hindered her career. But her interpretations stand: Here (and to a lesser degree on the follow-up album In My Own Time), Dalton transforms everyday songs into wrenching events.

Genre: Folk
Released: 1969, Capitol (Reissued 2003, Koch)
Key Tracks: "Little Bit of Rain," "Ribbon Bow," "In the Evening (It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best)"
Catalog Choice: In My Own Time
Next Stop: Fred Neil: Bleecker and MacDougal
After That: Nick Drake: Pink Moon
Book Pages: 203–204