Listen to Karen Dalton’s alternate cut of ‘Katie Cruel’
Karen Dalton was by no means the first to sing ‘Katie Cruel’. A traditional American folk song most likely of Scottish origin, it’s been doing the rounds since the mid-1700s. That being said, the song was perfectly suited to Dalton, and her guttural rendition is by far the most famous version. This alternate cut of the In My Own Time track offers an even more pained portrait of the Greenwich Village icon than the original.
Written from the perspective of an ostracised prostitute, ‘Katie Cruel’ is regarded by some as a sinister prophecy of Dalton’s sad end. NPR’s Stephen Thompson, for example, writes of how unsettling it is “to hear Dalton, who died homeless and hainted, sing of bridges burned and backs turned.” Of course, it is as much a reflection of her past as a predilection of her future. By the age of 21, she already had two failed marriages under her belt and two children, which couldn’t have gone down well in the rural mid-west.
I wonder if Dalton felt the need to sing ‘Katie Cruel’ not because she had a sense of her own destiny but because she was keenly aware of society’s tendency to castigate transgressive women. “If I was where I would be / Then I’d be where I am not / Here I am where I must be / Where I would be, I cannot,” she sings.
Dalton arrived in New York City in the early 1960s – around the same time as Bob Dylan – with a 12-string guitar and one of her two children in tow. The Greenwich Village folk scene was filled with free-spirited individuals looking for an escape. Dalton had more to escape than most and quickly fell in with the in-crowd, crossing paths with Dylan, Pete Seeger and other folk revivalists. Some of the songs favoured by the revivalists dated back as far as the Revolutionary War period, and ‘Katie Cruel’ was one.
Though Dalton made a profound impact on the likes of Bob Dylan when she first arrived in New York, her career never really took off. “When I first came to town, they brought me the bottles plenty,” she sings. “Now they’ve changed their tune, and they bring me the bottles empty.” Her final album, 1971’s In My Own Time, had the support of some of the biggest names in the industry but failed to sell, perhaps because, unlike Dylan, she refused to change with the times. The album’s failure, coupled with her fraught relationship with her daughters, heightened Dalton’s dependence on heroin, and she eventually died of AIDS in 1993. “Through the woods I go,” she sings in ‘Katie Cruel’, “And through the boggy mire / Straight way down the road / Til I come to my heart’s desire.”
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