Bob Dylan’s favourite singer from the Greenwich Village folk scene
Bob Dylan was always fascinated by the wild ones, those who had endured and made something of their lives against the odds. Even as a teenager in Hibbing, Minnesota, he had fallen in love with a girl whose family lived on the other side of the tracks, far from the Zimmermans’ middle-class district. According to the girl’s mother, this was part of the attraction. Her family were poor but, in Dylan’s eyes, possessed something far more valuable than money or property.
This obsession with what Dylan seems to have regarded as the authentic American experience stayed with him for many years, informing his appreciation for Woody Guthrie and the Greenwich Village folkies who became his comrades after his arrival in New York in 1961. One of them was Karen Dalton, a half-Cherokee, half-Irish singer whose voice became the stuff of legend. Like Dylan, she relocated to New York in the early 1960s, bringing her 12-string guitar, banjo and one of her two children with her. Her husband, she left behind. With two failed marriages under her belt at just 21, she was done with husbands.
A common fixture of Café Wha? in its heyday, Dalton’s music simmers with a rare depth of emotion, one the singer frequently found an outlet for in heroin and alcohol. Dalton found touring and recording to be particularly challenging, and she only produced two albums in her lifetime, both released in the early 1970s.
Neither sold well, and her talents remained largely unknown to those beyond the periphery of Greenwich Village. For her fellow folkies, however, she was a deity worthy of the utmost reverence. In Dylan’s memoir, Chronicles Volume 1, he describes watching her for the first time in Greenwich Village: “My favourite singer in the place was Karen Dalton,” he begins. “She was a tall, white blues singer and guitar player – funky, lanky and sultry. Karen had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played guitar like Jimmy Reed, and went all the way with it.”
Dylan spotted in Dalton something he felt many of their contemporaries lacked: authenticity. In the eyes of Dylan and many of his fellow artists, true folk music was born from hardship, making Dalton one of the truest folk musicians on the scene. Raised in an unflinchingly strict Southern Baptist household in dust bowl-era Oklahoma, she fell pregnant at the age of 16 and was obliged to marry the father.
She gave birth to a second child three years later but found life as a housewife unfulfilling, leaving her family behind to reinvent herself in New York. The guilt of having left her children behind would stay with Dalton her whole life, colouring her music and emphasising her already pronounced mood swings. Her singular vision and puritanical view of folk music may have seen her jettisoned from the group that became The Mamas & The Papas, but Dalton remains one of folk’s great voices.
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