Karen Dalton: Sang Like Billie, Dead Like Billie

She played the same Greenwich Village folk clubs that Dylan did when he was coming up. They’d even play together on occasion. Of her, Dylan would say: “Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.” Folkie Fred Neil (he wrote Everybody’s Talking from the movie Midnight Cowboy) said: “The greatest female singer I’ve ever heard.” Tim Hardin (he wrote Reason to Believe which both Dalton recorded and Rod Stewart made famous) said: “She’s an incredible broad.” Billboard magazine called her “spellbinding.”

Dalton didn’t care much for the Billie Holiday comparison.

She loved the music but hated the business. Her recording sessions were reportedly difficult and she didn’t do many. Many of her songs were recorded in a single take. Her style was soft and slow and restrained and her voice was perforated with pain. She was twice divorced and the mother of two children by 21 and, according to her daughter, had lost her bottom incisors breaking up a fight between two boyfriends. Her managers didn’t know what to do with her. After her last album in 1971 didn’t sell, she quit music, worked as a domestic and lived out her days in a trailer in Woodstock, New York. “I like being alone,” she said.

Her small but loyal cult of fans included Nick Cave, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, and Lacy J. Dalton (no relation). They’ve all cited her influence.

She also struggled with drugs and alcohol. (She may’ve been wrong about that being alone.) In 1993 she’d walk out on her rehab and died soon after of an AIDS-related illness.

Fred Neil: “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.”

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