Karen Dalton

One of the 60s folk revival’s most tragic forgotten souls, Karen J. Dalton (born 1937) made a lot of impressions with the right people (Bob Dylan, Fred Neil, Tim Hardin) in the Greenwich Village scene as a half-Cherokee banjo player from Oklahoma with a voice like Billie Holiday and a pulse on blues like Janis Joplin, but sadly died in obscurity in 1993 at age 55 of complications from AIDS with only two records to her name, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best (1969) and In My Own Time (1971).

However, though both of those records didn’t contain one original Dalton-penned narrative, her anti-hero, gritty interpretations of traditional folk songs and soul nuggets (“When a Man Loves a Woman,” “How Sweet it Is”) eventually opened a rabbit hole into deeper cut rearrangements like Chet Powers’ “Something on My Mind,” revealing an immaculate tapestry of lovelorn gems that has since cemented her status as a cult classic, influencing everyone from Lucinda Williams to Nick Cave, Cave calling “Something on My Mind” “the most extraordinary vocal [he’s] ever heard.”

A combination of drug problems, stage fright, a refusal to play the commercial game, and plain old bad luck stagnated Dalton’s career over the decades and ultimately led to her death, though one last window opened up via old folk guitarist Peter Walker, who unearthed a collection of Dalton’s notebooks containing never-before-seen poems and song lyrics that led to the post-humous album, Remembering Mountains: Unheard Songs by Karen Dalton (2015), featuring Sharon Van Etten, Patty Griffin, Marissa Nadler, among a host of others, and offering a new perspective of the kind of love and loss narratives Dalton brought to the world.