Karen Dalton: The lost queen of the Greenwich Village folk scene

Originally published in Uncut Take 113 [June 2008 issue], we profile Karen Dalton – the queen of Greenwich Village, a bewitching blues singer adored by everyone from Bob Dylan to Fred Neil. But why did she only release two brilliant albums in her lifetime? And why did she disappear for two decades? We speak to friends and family to uncover the truth about love, music, drugs, illness and the great lost star of the ’60s folk boom…

“She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry…”

There’s a photograph, taken in February 1961 on the stage of the Café Wha? in New York’s Greenwich Village. On the left is Bob Dylan – in a black cloth cap, a check shirt, pale waistcoat and blue jeans – earnestly blowing a harmonica. On the right, a white-shirted Fred Neil – the man behind classic songs like “Everybody’s Talking” – is boisterously strumming a guitar and singing. And, in the middle, you see a pretty young singer called Karen Dalton, sitting perfectly still, her eyes clamped shut, her mouth open, her hair long and dark, trimmed into a brutal fringe above her eyes.

Although Dylan and Neil became household names, it was Karen Dalton who was the star of this ad hoc trio. She was, according to Richie Havens, “the undisputed queen of the Greenwich Village folk scene” at the time. Others agree. “My favourite singer in the place was Karen Dalton,” writes Dylan in Chronicles. “She was a tall white blues singer and guitar player, funky, lanky and sultry… Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it.” Neil described her as “my favourite female vocalist and a heavy influence on my own style of singing … she sure can sing the shit out of the blues”; for Tim Hardin she was “an incredible broad”.

“The atmosphere in these places was magic”

Fifteen years after her death and 37 years since her last recorded album, Karen Dalton’s name is now getting the recognition many think it deserves. Nick Cave, Devendra Banhart and Lenny Kaye have written glowing sleeve notes to her re-released albums; Joanna Newsom, Cat Power, Antony Hegarty and Lucinda Williams have declared themselves huge fans, while her voice remains the touchstone for the new folk revival. “My children are astounded that their grandmother, whom they never met, is on MySpace, VH1 and MTV,” laughs Karen Dalton’s daughter Abralyn. “I’m astounded that people want to know when her next concert is!”

Café Wha was just one of dozens of early 1960s coffee bars that flourished in the three blocks downtown of Washington Square Park.

“The atmosphere in these places was magic,” recalls Richie Havens. “There was like 100 coffee houses within three blocks. Every night was unique. You’d spend all day there, playing a few songs, passing the hat, picking up enough change to get yourself another coffee.”

“A crazy, amazingly diverse crowd of people”

Major Wiley, another veteran folk singer, agrees. “We’d turn up to the coffee bars about noon, have breakfast and then stay there all day, till maybe three or four in the morning. Café Wha was the best, because it was open all day and had wall-to-wall music. And it was home to a crazy, amazingly diverse crowd of people. You might have had Richard Pryor or Bill Cosby doing stand up, maybe Jose Feliciano or Tim Hardin or Odetta or the Clancy Brothers playing earlier in the evening. Sometimes, an old blues legend like Revd Gary Davies or Mississippi John Hurt might drop by.

“And it’d be noisy as hell, places where guys like Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, George Seagal, Alan Alder, Robert Downey Sr and Jack Kerouac might get into big symposiums. But you can be sure that everyone would stay quiet when Karen Dalton performed. Her voice was hypnotic. She sung at a pitch and an intensity that cut through the atmosphere, like a crying child. You just had to listen.”

“Karen inhabited her own genre,” explains Richie Havens. “The rest of us were all young city kids who’d heard a bit of folk music and had a go at it. But Karen, she seemed like she’d lived this life, someone who’d been born to sing these beautiful, ancient songs. And that made her the most important singer there. Her authenticity dignified everyone else. She gave us the pictures that enabled us to make sense of our own folk music.”

“She looked as striking as she sounded”

You can see ancient black-and-white footage of Karen on YouTube, singing Neil’s “A Little Bit Of Rain” in that deliciously sad, Billie Holiday croak.
“She looked like a cowgirl,” says Major Wiley. “Tall, slim, attractive, fresh-faced. Her hair would be done in pigtails and bangs, like an Indian squaw. Her manner was straight, no frills. She looked as striking as she sounded.”

By the time she was the star of Greenwich Village, the fresh-faced country girl was a 23 year old single mother of two children. She was born Karen Cariker on July 19, 1937 in Bonham, Texas, and moved to Enid, Oklahoma when she was young. Her mother Evelyn was partly Native American, her father was Irish.

Her mother said Karen could play any instrument she wanted, including a violin she gave her. By the age of eight she’d taught herself to sight-sing classical music; by her teens she was drawn to blues, jazz and the folk songs of the Appalachians; aged 14, she’d created a number of impressive oil paintings.

“A very well-connected political family in Colorado”

Karen was around 16 when she gave birth to her first son, Johnny Lee Murray (it’s unclear who his father was), and custody was awarded to Karen’s mother Evelyn. Within two years, Karen had enrolled at University of Kansas in Lawrence, KA and fallen pregnant again, to an English Literature professor, Don Dalton. When their relationship broke down, Dalton was given custody of their daughter Abralyn and Karen went to live in Colorado.

In the summer of 1960 she started dating guitarist Dick Weissman. Within a week, he’d asked her if she wanted to move to New York with him. Together they embarked on the drive in his Renault 4CV from Colorado, along with Karen’s sister and her boyfriend Art Benjamin, dropping them off at Philadelphia.

“I got an early impression that Karen’s family was like something out of a soap opera,” laughs Weissman. “Her sister Joy was only 17 and had previously been married to a guy from a very well-connected political family in Colorado. His family were keen to annul the marriage and get her out of the state because she was underage. It was crazy, like we were being chased off the state borders!”

“The first time I saw Karen sing changed me life”

The drama continued after Karen reached New York, when she concocted a plan to wrest Abralyn back from Don Dalton. She went to visit him in Carbondale, Illinois, where he was lecturing at Southern Illinois University, and faked a reconciliation with him to get access to her daughter. A few days later she was back in New York, having “kidnapped” Abralyn, and preceded to bring her up in while she played the coffeehouse circuit.

Abbe, as she was known, was four by then, and was to have an unorthodox upbringing. Weismann was around for a few months before he moved to San Francisco to work with The Journeymen (a trio with John Phillips of the Mamas And The Papas and Scott McKenzie). Karen moved out of his apartment and in with a classical guitarist called John Stauber.

Before long she’d moved in to an apartment on the Lower East Side with another singer-songwriter, Richard Tucker. “I can honestly say that the first time I saw Karen sing changed me life,” remembers Tucker. “I’d just come out of the army, playing trumpet in the army band. The moment I saw her play, I traded my trumpet for a guitar, I started to grow my hair. I wanted to make music like that.”

“The first time I saw Karen sing changed me life”

They married and spent the next five years together. As a duo, sometimes bolstered by third vocalist Tim Hardin, they built up a reputation on the Greenwich Village circuit, even appearing on the front cover of the New York Herald Tribune’s Sunday Magazine in September 1963 to illustrate a feature on the “folk revival”.

“You’d see her Tim Hardin and Richard Tucker singing three-part harmonies,” says Richie Havens, “And that was just magical. They sung in that Appalachian mountain style – those strange, weird harmonies were so spartan and beautiful. That was the best stuff she ever made and it’s a damn shame it’s never been put on record.”

By 1962 Richard and Karen left New York for Colorado to raise Abralyn, and it was here that Karen recorded for the first time – although the results wouldn’t see the light of day for another 45 years. First came Cotton Eye Joe, a double album of material recorded live at Joe Loop’s Attic Club in Boulder, Colorado and released last year on Megaphone Records. The same label has unearthed a collection of songs, entitled Green Rocky Road, that Karen and Richard Tucker recorded on Joe Loop’s two-track reel-to-reel recorder in their front room.

“A kind of brutal honesty”

“They’re both very different recordings,” explains Dick Weissman. “Cotton Eye Joe is closer to the Billie Holiday-style stuff for which she’s famous. But the Green Rocky Road tapes are much closer to how I remember her sounding in those early days. It’s full-blooded, wide-open throated mountain singing. I’m probably in a minority of one in that I don’t like the recordings where she sounds like Billie Holiday. For me, there’s a kind of brutal honesty about Appalachian stuff has that’s missing from the jazzier recordings.”

Part of Karen’s reputation for folk authenticity came from her obsessive habit of curating a repertoire of traditional music. “She used to collect sheet music,” says Peter Walker, a singer-songwriter perhaps best known for his association with Timothy Leary.

“I’ve got a shoebox full of songs that Karen used to sing. They’re all here – Pete Seeger, Dino Valente, Tim Hardin and a ton of public domain stuff. She could read music in a rudimentary way, and she’d study these pieces intently, getting the phrasing right. She used to talk about picturing yourself in the moment and then putting yourself in the song. Singing was like method acting to her. She’d work at every line. She always used to approach a note from below the note. If you start too high it sounds stupid to slide downwards, she’d say, but you can get away with slurring up. You hear that a lot in her singing. That’s why her music has that loose, melismatic quality associated with jazz and blues.”

“For her, singing was about communicating”

There’s an image of Dalton as a perpetual junkie who abandoned her children; in fact, by all accounts, she was a committed mother to Abbe. She spent the mid 60s bringing up her daughter and, for a few years, trained horses in Colorado (“we stayed in a really cool old Airstream trailer house which was part of her pay,” says Abralyn). Occasionally visitors like Tim Hardin dropped by, sometimes she’d play local folk clubs near Denver, or she’d leave Abbe with her sister Joy in Tacoma, Washington or her mother in Oklahoma and play gigs in New York or Los Angeles.

Lacy J Dalton, a renowned bluegrass singer who renamed herself in honour of her musical hero, first met Karen in LA around 1966. “She had a voice for a jaded ear, for people who knew a lot about music,” says Lacy. “The texture was cornmeal and gravel. And her music came accompanied by a philosophy. She always said ‘Don’t sing a song, speak it. Be conversational. You have to talk to the music and stay in time.’ For her, singing was about communicating. Phrasing was everything.”

By 1967 Karen had split up with Richard Tucker. “I remember having a screaming fight with her in the car in Denver,” he sighs. “I walked out of the car and never saw her again”. Despite being away from the spotlight, Karen’s reputation continued to grow. She was even the subject of The Band’s “Katie’s Been Gone”, recorded around this time and released on 1975’s The Basement Tapes. In 1967, Fred Neil recommended her to Nik Venet, a senior figure at Capitol Records who discovered the Beach Boys. After much pleading, Venet eventually convinced Karen to turn up to a Neil recording session in 1969, where her and a four-piece band quickly recorded 10 songs.

“It’s gone down in rock mythology”

The result, It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best, was her first experience in a proper studio, and it remains a classic. Harvey Brooks’s bass, Kim King’s electric guitar, Dan Hankin’s acoustic and Karen’s 12-string weave together to create a cat’s cradle of strings, as Karen gently croons material by Neil, Hardin and Wiley, a Stax song by Eddie Floyd, a Jelly Roll Morton song and songs made famous by Big Bill Broonzy, Elmore James and Leadbelly.

“It’s gone down in rock mythology that Nik recorded Karen in the studio without her knowing, which wasn’t true,” said Dan Hankin, a guitarist on the 1969 album and a regular in Karen’s bands until 1972. “But she could be difficult and did need a lot of reassurance to feel comfortable.”

Only a few thousand copies of the album were pressed by Capitol, and Karen returned to her mother’s house in Enid, Oklahoma. By this time, a well-connected friend of Tim Hardin called Michael Lang – co-promoter of the Woodstock Festival – had seen Karen perform in LA and wanted to sign her to his label Just Sunshine. Karen’s mother saw a photo of Lang, decided that he “looked like Jesus”, and convinced her daughter to sign the contract.

“She lost all faith in the music industry”

Late in 1970, Karen started recorded her second studio album In My Own Time at Bearsville Studios just outside of Woodstock, New York. It took six months to record, at a cost of $40,000, a fortune for a small label like Lang’s. Journeyman bassist Harvey Brooks was drafted in as producer to create a harder, country rock album, using pedal steel, violin and a horn section. If it’s Karen’s most fully realised and commercial release, it’s also the furthest from her roots that she ever strayed, betraying a decadent post-60s-come-down feel associated with The Band.

In My Own Time was critically acclaimed and accompanied by big adverts in Billboard, and her version of “When a Man Loves A Woman” got some radio airplay. Lang even got the band to promote the album in Europe as an unlikely arena support act for Santana (they ended up breaking away from the Santana tour and playing smaller club dates). But the album was a commercial failure, which came as a blow for Karen. “She felt she’d compromised as much as she could and it had got her nowhere,” explains Dan Hankin. “I think she lost all faith in the music industry.”

After a recording session in 1972 singing backing vocals for the Holy Modal Rounders, Dalton’s last two decades are something of a mystery. For a while she lived with Holy Modal Rounders guitarist Hunt Middleton in a New York loft on 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue, where they’d host regular informal jam sessions with musician friends.

“There wasn’t a sound during her performance”

Peter Walker recalls seeing Karen perform professionally for the last time at Joyous Lake, a venue near Woodstock run by Ron Merrians, sometime in the mid-80s. “She was fragile and had a hard time being functional. But she was still a compelling performer. There wasn’t a sound during her performance. She still had that ability to command a busy room into silence.”

Lacy J Dalton insists that Karen was in a bad way by the late 1980s, addicted to heroin and Valium and refusing treatment. Lacy’s understanding of events – that Karen died on the streets of New York after a heroin overdose – has become the accepted gospel, but it’s almost certainly not true.

Karen’s diaries in those last years do list several terrifying episodes at the hands of burglars and dealers near the apartment where she stayed in the Bronx. Walker also confirms that around this time she contracted HIV (thought to have been picked up by an infected needle) and her health began to deteriorate. But he and other friends insist that she was never homeless in her last years; many are even sceptical that Karen was ever a long-term heroin addict.

“A beer a day, a joint maybe, sure, but nothing stronger”

“If I can stress one thing, it’s that Karen did not die a junkie, living on the streets,” confirms Walker. “She was in a comfortable home with a bed and a heated swimming pool. She had medical treatment. When she was feeling ill or had fevers she’d come and stay with someone in upstate New York. I guess people like the romantic stories of drug use. It’s all part of the myth of the blues singer. But I can honestly say that, in the 30 odd years I knew Karen, that I never saw her use hard drugs. A beer a day, a joint maybe, sure, but nothing stronger.”

Walker remembers the last time he saw her in 1993. “I went round her place to see if she was alright. She seemed to be asleep so I put on the TV to wait to give her medication. I remember watching The Price Is Right. The show finished and I went to see if she’d woken up. She never did.

“She was the sort of childlike good friend that only a child can appreciate. I still expect her to be on the bus taking me up, singing to me in that incredible voice. I think she’d be very pleased to see that her music’s finally getting the attention it deserves.”