Her career was marked by almosts and “If she’d only shown up” for shows whose rehearsals so exhausted her she almost never did, or for tour dates (Lang had her opening for Santana). He rounded up others and started The Mamas and the Papas. She couldn’t get along with John Phillips long enough for them to build a folk act with two other friends. She had two missing teeth from getting into the middle of a fight between two boyfriends (one of them interviewed here), shunned makeup, “a Bohemian” who put her daughter through a childhood of no-real-home hardship sleeping on the floors of friend’s apartments as she covered songs by Woody Guthrie, George Jones, Tim Hardin and others and made a name for herself during the glory days of New York folk. She grew up poor, married at 15, never finished high school and rarely prettied herself up for her shows. Like many, Dalton was only truly “discovered” posthumously.įriends, colleagues and others remember her as the “only authentic” working class/dirt farm folkie to haunt the Greenwich Village of that era. No, this version didn’t come out on LP during her lifetime. Listen to this Tim Hardin song that Rod Stewart, among others, made famous.
She didn’t write much of her own music, which held her back, and didn’t get a record deal until Woodstock producer Michael Lang was offered his own record label by Paramount and he signed her, years too late for a folk singer to break out, even if the records - one of which was titled “In My Own Time” - had captured her magic. Texas born, Oklahoma-raised, Greenwich Village-adored Karen Dalton showed up in New York at almost the same time as Dylan, already married twice and just 21, eventually towing her toddler Abbe around to the folk clubs where she played - Cafe Wha? was the most famous - letting her audience be her babysitter. “Karen Dalton: In My Own Time” is a documentary remembrance of a folk star who never quite was.
“She sings like Billie Holiday and plays (guitar, among other instruments) like Jimmy Reed.” The voice is fractured, fragile and intimate - “plaintive, earthy and insinuating” an early Village Voice critic called it.īob Dylan got even closer to the mark by stating the obvious about Karen Dalton and who she was plainly imitating with her pitch, her halting, emotive delivery.
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