


Karen Dalton could sound like Billie Holiday. She had the striking beauty of a Walker Evans Dust Bowl portrait. Bob Dylan called her his favorite singer from the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1960s. Karen Dalton never enjoyed much commercial success. But 15 years after her death, her emotional performances and tragic life story continue to attract new fans. Joel Rose reports.

JOEL ROSE: The new Karen Dalton CD was 45 years in the making.

Ms. KAREN DALTON (Folksinger): Recorded on two tracks.

(Soundbite of music)

ROSE: Dalton performed these songs at her cabin in Colorado with nothing but a 12-string guitar, a banjo and her voice.

(Soundbite of song "Green Rocky Road")

Ms. DALTON: (Singing) Green, green, rocky road. Promenade in green. Tell me who you love. Tell me who you love. Tell me who do you love.

Mr. JOE LOOP (Proprietor, The Attic): I can still see her in my mind, sitting in her rocking chair with that long-neck banjo, rocking back and forth playing.

ROSE: Joe Loop made these recordings on a reel-to-reel tape deck in 1963. At the time, Loop owned a coffee shop in Boulder called The Attic. Young singers who were just discovering traditional folk music would stop there on the way from coast to coast, people like David Crosby and John Phillips. Joe Loop says Karen Dalton put most of them to shame.

Mr. LOOP: She was the real deal. Karen had been actually living the life and doing it for some time.

(Soundbite of song "Green Rocky Road")

Ms. DALTON: (Singing) Circle, circle, circle dot. We all clothed in polka dot. Circle, circle, circle dot. You can't give what you ain't got.

ROSE: Dalton grew up in Oklahoma. She was married and divorced twice by the time she was 21. She moved to Greenwich Village in the early 1960s where she crossed paths with Bob Dylan who occasionally backed her up on harmonica. Dalton also got married for a third time to folksinger Richard Tucker.

Mr. RICHARD TUCKER (Folksinger): If you saw her on a stage in a small club and heard her voice, it was just awesome. My favorite was when she did blues really slow. The slowest blues I ever heard in my life.

(Soundbite of song "A Little Bit of Rain")

Ms. DALTON: (Singing) If I should leave you, Try to remember all the good times. Warm days filled with sunshine, And just a little bit of rain.

ROSE: It wasn't just Dalton's singing that drew comparisons to Billie Holiday. Her tumultuous personal life has also become part of her mythology. Her daughter Abralyn Baird says that Dalton lost her two bottom front teeth when she got in the middle of a fight between boyfriends.

Ms. ABRALYN BAIRD: The man she was living with at the time, he came home and found her in bed with my soon-to-be stepfather. And yeah, and a fight ensued. And she got punched in the face. She always said, you know, when she got that big recording contract and became famous, she was going to have teeth put in.

ROSE: But that big recording contract never came through. Dalton was tall and beautiful and certainly looked like a star. But veteran bass player and producer Harvey Brooks says she wasn't interested in playing the music industry's games in an era when musicians had little other choice.

Mr. HARVEY BROOKS (Bass Player; Producer): Karen came from the backwoods of Oklahoma. She was different. She was very laidback and reserved.

ROSE: Brooks says when the industry was finally ready to pay attention, Dalton's life was a mess.

Mr. BROOKS: There was no fire behind her. And by the time the fire came, her personal fire was not up to it.

(Soundbite of music)

ROSE: Dalton did manage to record two albums, Brooks producing the second one. But he says her personal problems, including a growing fondness for hard drugs and alcohol, made recording them difficult and touring to promote them impossible.

(Soundbite of song "Katie Cruel")

Ms. DALTON: (Singing) When I first came to town, They called me the roving jewel; Now they've changed their tune, They call me Katie Cruel...

ROSE: Record companies might have taken Karen Dalton for a rube, though Abralyn Baird insists her mother was anything but.

Ms. BAIRD: She was really intelligent and really well read. I mean, our house was always full of books. She knew what was going on in the world. She knew, you know, how things worked. She knew literature, the whole bit. When people approached her as being the stupid farm girl from Oklahoma, it could really piss her off in a hurry.

ROSE: And when record executives tried to change her music, Baird says it made her even angrier.

Ms. BAIRD: She wanted to have her sound. That's what they told her they wanted to hear. And then she'd get in a recording studio, and they're like, well, we'll just add a couple of tracks to this. And she's like, no! You know, she'd get - just get furious. My mother was the kind of person who would scream at bank tellers.

ROSE: But at the same time Karen Dalton was a reluctant performer according to cafe owner and recordist Joe Loop.

Mr. LOOP: She had a way of carrying herself and an aura about her of strength that made it surprising that somebody who had such a strong personality would get in a situation like a recording situation and be really shy and intimidated by the whole thing.

ROSE: It's a contradiction that Dalton isn't around to resolve. She died in 1993. And if she gave any recorded interviews, they apparently don't survive. The mystery that surrounds her life may be part of the reason for her recent comeback.

Ms. DALTON: Let's play that.

ROSE: In the last two years, independent labels have put out three CDs' worth of reissued and unreleased material.

(Soundbite of song "In The Evening")

Ms. DALTON: (Singing) In the evening. In the evening, darling. When the sun goes down. Yes, in the evening. You know, when the sun goes down. It's, oh, lots of men, lots of them. When the one you love is not around.

ROSE: Joe Loop who recorded Karen Dalton in her mountain home says he's not surprised she's having more success now than she did in her own lifetime.

Mr. LOOP: Most of the people that were recording in the late '50s, early '60s were people like the Weavers and Pete Seeger, and then of course Joan Baez, kind of the Ozzie and Harriet people of the folk-music world. Straight, cleaned up. Karen didn't belong in that world.

(Soundbite of song "In The Evening")

Ms. DALTON: (Singing) Goodbye my sweethearts and pie. I'm going away.

ROSE: Karen Dalton's stormy personal life may have scared away record executives 40 years ago, but it may also be one of the reasons new fans are discovering what many of her peers knew all along. For NPR News, I'm Joel Rose.

(Soundbite of song "In The Evening")

Ms. DALTON: (Singing) When the sun goes down.

WERTHEIMER: You can hear more of Karen Dalton's music online in the music section of






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