The tall Oklahoman woman with waist-length hair and two missing bottom teeth stood behind a concrete door in a European corridor while thousands of stoned teenagers chanted for Santana and her band died in slow motion on stage. She never walked out. She never explained.
And 22 years later, the thing she was hiding from finally finished the job.
Karen Dalton, the singer Bob Dylan called his favorite in Greenwich Village, the woman Fred Neil said could sing the blues out of hell itself, died on March 19, 1993 in a borrowed mobile home in Hurley, New York. She was 55. Her son Lee found her.
Peter Walker, the friend who had been bringing her medication, sat through an entire episode of The Price Is Right before realizing she was gone.
The coroner listed AIDS as the cause. She had been diagnosed with HIV in the mid-1980s, most likely from a shared needle. She lived with the virus for nearly a decade, which in that era was close to a miracle.
She did it in a house upstate with a heated swimming pool, lent by a friend serving a prison sentence. The image is so at odds with the junkie-in-a-doorway legend that almost nobody repeats it.
But the legend has always been easier than the truth. The truth is that Karen Dalton was born Jean Karen Cariker on July 19, 1937 in Bonham, Texas, a cotton and railroad town a few miles south of the Red River. She was taken north into Oklahoma before she was old enough to remember the journey.
Enid was where her childhood happened, a weak town laid flat on the top of the state, its grain elevators standing up out of the plain like the last buildings on Earth.
The household was strict and Southern Baptist. Her father worked as a welder. Her mother Evelyn was a nurse.
There were books in the house. Her grandmother was a fiddle-playing, gospel-shouting Baptist who passed instruments around at family gatherings and nobody was performing for anybody. By eight, Karen had taught herself to sight-sing classical music.
By 14, she was painting in oils and painting well.
Her first guitar was a plywood Gene Autry model ordered out of the Sears catalog. From it she moved to a 12-string and a long-neck banjo which she tuned down and played hard, taught to herself with no lessons and no permission. Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders, who would later play in her band and both love her and be exhausted by her, put it into one phrase: She was the only folk singer I ever met with an authentic folk background.
Everyone else on the scene came to the old songs through a record collection. Karen came to them through a kitchen singalong.
She was also, by the standards of Enid in 1953, in trouble. She was married at around 16 and had a son, Johnny Lee Murray. The marriage ended almost immediately and custody of the boy went to her mother.
This is the first appearance of the pattern that would shadow every good thing that happened to her: something arrives, she cannot hold onto it in the way everyone else expects, and it ends up going to somebody more conventional.
Within two years, she had enrolled at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and become pregnant again, this time by an English literature professor named Don Dalton, whose surname she kept long after she had discarded him. Abelyn was born in 1956. When that marriage broke, Dalton took custody and Karen went to Colorado with two divorces, two children she was not raising, and a repertoire of songs nobody in her family thought was a career.
She was 21.
In the summer of 1960, she started seeing a guitarist named Dick Weissman. Within a week he had asked her to come to New York with him. They drove east in his Renault 4CV, a car roughly the size of a modern refrigerator, with Karen’s teenage sister Joy and Joy’s boyfriend crammed into the back.
They dropped the pair off in Philadelphia. Joy had been married to a boy from a well-connected Colorado political family who wanted the marriage annulled and the girl removed from the state on account of her age.
I got an early impression that Karen’s family was like something out of a soap opera, Weissman laughed decades later. It was crazy, like we were being chased off the state borders.
The drama did not stop at the Hudson. Having reached New York, Karen worked out that she wanted her daughter back and she went and got her. She traveled to Carbondale, Illinois, where Don Dalton was lecturing at Southern Illinois University, performed a reconciliation convincing enough to get her through the front door, and a few days later was back in Manhattan with a 4-year-old and no legal standing whatsoever.
Yeah, she took off with me, Abelyn said. But remember, she was a 19-year-old girl.
She was in fact 23, but the daughter’s instinct is true. Her mother was young in the way that has nothing to do with birthdays.
What Karen Dalton walked into was one of the great accidental cultural moments of the century: three blocks of Greenwich Village south of Washington Square where perhaps a hundred coffee houses were operating at once and the rent was survivable and the hat was passed. Cafe Wha? was open all day with wall-to-wall music.
On any given night the room might contain Richard Pryor doing stand-up, a Delta blues legend wandering in off MacDougal Street, and a symposium of shouting novelists in the corner.
Into this din came a woman from Enid who did not smile at the audience, did not introduce her songs, sat perfectly still with her eyes closed and her chin down, and stopped the noise dead.
There is a photograph taken in February 1961 by Fred W. McDarrah that ought to be on the wall of every conservatory in America. On the left, a 19-year-old Bob Dylan, cloth cap and harmonica, working hard.
On the right, Fred Neil, strumming and grinning. In the middle, eyes shut, mouth open, hair cut into a black fringe like a blade, was Karen Dalton.
Dylan was the new boy. Forty-three years later in Chronicles he would put her at the top of the pile, his favorite singer in the place, quote, Funky, lanky, and sultry. A voice like Billie Holiday and a guitar like Jimmy Reed.
Fred Neil, who wrote Everybody’s Talking and had no need to be generous to anyone, called her his favorite female vocalist and a heavy influence on his own singing, and then produced a line that tells it as straight as it goes: She sure can sing the hell out of the blues.
Tim Hardin, more economically, called her an incredible broad. Richie Havens went further. She was, he said, quote, The undisputed queen of the Greenwich Village folk scene.
The queen, however, was living in a tenement with a bathroom that did not work. Abelyn, being a child, took it in her stride and learned to slip into the toilets of the Phillips 66 station down the block. On the doorbell of a later Sullivan Street apartment, Karen wrote not her own name, but Katie Cruel, after the traditional ballad about a woman who arrives in town as a jewel and is renamed by the town, a song she sang all her life.
She was also by then missing two teeth from her lower jaw. The story of how is the sort of thing that would have been a career in itself for a man. Her daughter told it as it was: the man Karen was living with came home and found her in bed with Abelyn’s soon-to-be stepfather.
A fight ensued. Karen got between them, and Karen got punched in the face.
She was philosophical. She used to say that when the big recording contract came and she was famous, she would have the teeth put in.
Men came and went with a velocity that scandalized nobody at the time and has been used to diminish her ever since. Weissman left for San Francisco. There was a classical guitarist called John Starbuck.
Then came Richard Tucker, a singer-songwriter fresh out of the army, where he had played trumpet in the band.
I can honestly say that the first time I saw Karen sing changed my life, Tucker said. He traded the trumpet for a guitar and grew his hair. They married, played as a duo, and for a while operated as a trio with Tim Hardin, singing the strange Spartan Appalachian harmonies that Havens still mourned half a century later as the best music she ever made and a great unrecorded loss of the era.
On September 15, 1963, Karen Dalton and Richard Tucker appeared on the cover of the New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine, photographed at Gerde’s Folk City. It is as close to mainstream fame as she ever came, and she was already planning her escape.
New York, she decided, was a marketplace rather than a life, and she did not want her daughter in its schools.
By 1962, she and Tucker had gone to Colorado. There, in mining cabins in the foothills west of Boulder that rented for 15 or 30 dollars a month, she did the thing she was actually built for. She played music in living rooms and let people come to her.
Joe Loop ran a coffee house across from the university called The Attic and had the wit to point a two-track reel-to-reel machine at the proceedings, which is why we can hear her at all in this period. He also witnessed the domestic engineering. One morning, he drove up to find Karen demolishing the wall between the cabin and the tool shed and feeding it into the wood stove, then tearing up the shed floor and burning that, too.
Then carrying stones up from the creek to lay a floor low enough that she could stand upright, thereby converting the shed into a kitchen.
I had never known another woman that would have or could have done that, he said.
The poverty was real and unromantic. Tucker trimmed trees. Karen cleaned houses for a fraternity at a dollar twenty-five an hour.
Stampfel remembered the interiors: a rocking chair rescued from the trash, an orange crate, a head of cabbage, everything of no value and everything placed just right.
Of that stretch of her life, she said, You think it’s temporary and suddenly it’s your life.
She did not seem to mind. If you don’t like solitude, then Colorado will drive you nuts, she said. I like that.
Through the middle 1960s, she trained horses, lived for a while in an Airstream trailer that came as part of the pay, and bought her daughter a pony. Hardin turned up. Musicians drove hundreds of miles to sit in her front room.
Occasionally, she left Abelyn with her sister in Tacoma or her mother in Enid and went to New York or Los Angeles to work.
It was in Los Angeles, around 1966, that a young singer named Jill Byron met her, was permanently changed by her, and eventually took her surname as a stage name in tribute. As Lacy J. Dalton, she became a country star, which is a fate Karen never had to worry about.
She had a voice for the jaded ear, Lacy said, describing a texture somewhere between cornmeal and gravel, and a phrasing that was closer to a horn than a throat.
The philosophy came with the sound. Karen’s instruction to younger singers was consistent and slightly menacing: Do not sing a song, speak it, be conversational, talk to the music, and stay in time.
Peter Walker, who kept a shoebox of her sheet music for 30 years, watched her build performances line by line like an actor. She always used to approach a note from below the note, he said. If you start too high, she told him, sliding down sounds stupid.
You can always get away with slurring up.
That is the entire secret of the melisma that has been imitated by two generations and never once matched.
The Los Angeles house also acquired a lodger who has to be seen to be believed. Cheech Marin, then a young record reviewer, heard her album, demanded an interview, arrived at the door, found a room for rent, and moved in for six months. He remembered the voice and the rest.
She had drug problems, he said, and it did slow her up a lot.
By 1967, the marriage to Tucker was finished. He remembered the end like a man who has replayed it over and over: an argument in a car in the middle of Denver, him getting out and walking away, and never seeing her again.
Karen was a paradox, he said. She thought of herself on a really high level. She considered herself great, which she was, but she didn’t approach things that way.
There was, he said, an inner fragility that I can’t begin to explain to you.
Her reputation kept growing in her absence, which is the only way she could stand to have one. Around this time, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson wrote Katie’s Been Gone in the basement of a pink house in West Saugerties, a song about a woman who leaves and fades and cannot be talked into coming home. Everyone who knew Karen Dalton assumed it was about Karen Dalton.
She turned down a folk group with John Phillips because she would not surrender control of the arrangements or dilute the material. Phillips went off and found people who would, made the Mamas and the Papas, and became rich. Karen went back to the mountains.
Fred Neil, meanwhile, had been talking about her to Nick Venet at Capitol Records, the man who had signed the Beach Boys. Venet had been trying and failing to get her onto tape for years. What finally worked, in 1969, has turned into music mythology.
The story goes that Neil lured her to his own session, that Venet asked her as a personal favor to cut Neil’s A Little Bit of Rain for his private collection, and that the ice broke and the entire album followed in a single night, most tracks in one take, with the artist never even realizing the machine was running.
Stampfel told it that way and told it well. Dan Hankin, in the room playing acoustic guitar, has spent decades saying it is nonsense.
She had a set list, he said, she knew what she was doing.
Karen’s own account, given to a press officer at the time, was oddly professional, calling it three days, three sessions, no drama. And then, because she was Karen, she added the sentence that tells you what she actually cared about: It shows how well I played the guitar.
It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, its title lifted from a line of Leroy Carr’s, is one of the strangest and most beautiful debut albums of the decade. A cat’s cradle of Harvey Brooks’s bass, Kim King’s electric, Hankin’s acoustic, and Karen’s 12-string, with songs from Neil and Hardin and Jelly Roll Morton and Booker T. Jones and Lead Belly.
All of them dragged behind the beat and rebuilt in their own crooked, magnificent time.
The Village Voice called it plaintive, earthy, insinuating, real, and said the record made the reviewer want to cry. Capitol pressed a few thousand copies, did nothing whatsoever, and dropped her. Karen went home to her mother’s house in Enid.
The second chance arrived in the shape of Michael Lang, the curly-haired co-promoter of the Woodstock Festival, now running a label called Just Sunshine. Lang had seen her play in Los Angeles and wanted her. Fred Neil telephoned ahead to warn her, and the deal, by the account of Lang’s own press office, was closed not by money or by ambition, but by Evelyn Cariker of Enid, Oklahoma, who looked at a photograph of Michael Lang, decided he looked like Jesus, and told her daughter to sign.
She went to Woodstock the way a person goes into exile, which is to say she took everything. Late in 1970, she arrived to record at Bearsville Studios with her two teenage children, Lee and Abelyn, a poodle-chihuahua cross named Shalom, and a horse.
Her son had never been East before. When we got off the plane and stood on the bus and saw all those cemeteries you pass on the way into the city, it just blew his mind, she said. I don’t blame him.
I think that is worse than air pollution. The Indians used to just bury their dead in a tree.
In My Own Time took six months and $40,000, an alarming sum for a small label. It is the record on which the industry finally tried to build her a career. Harvey Brooks produced and arranged, pushing her toward pedal steel, violin, and a horn section, toward Dino Valenti’s Something on Your Mind, written specifically for her, toward the Percy Sledge hit and the Marvin Gaye hit and The Band’s In a Station.
Brooks was honest about the method. Because she was not a writer, he said, everything had to be built for her, and her emotional storms had to be handled at every step. On a folk record, you accept what you get.
On a pop record, you work the singer.
He worked her. She allowed it, liked the bigger sound, and made damn sure that Katie Cruel went on the album, alone with nothing but a banjo tuned down into the dark.
Her daughter watched the same process from the other side of the glass. She wanted to have her sound, Abelyn said. That’s what they told her they wanted to hear.
Then someone would suggest adding a couple of tracks, and Karen would go up like a struck match. My mother was the kind of person who would scream at bank tellers.
The record came out in 1971 to real reviews and real advertisements in Billboard. Her version of When a Man Loves a Woman got some radio play. Den Lang, with more enthusiasm than sense, sent the least demonstrative performer in America out as the opening act for Santana.
It is difficult to imagine a worse pairing. She couldn’t project herself in a big venue, Hankin said. The other thing was that nobody came to hear Karen Dalton.
They all came to hear Santana.
On May 1, 1971, she played the Golden Rose Festival at Montreux. There is footage, and she is extraordinary. Somewhere on that same tour, she stayed in the dressing room while the band vamped and the crowd howled, and did not come out at all.
The tour eventually broke away from Santana altogether to play clubs, and something in her broke with it.
The album sold nothing. She felt she’d compromised as much as she could, Hankin said, and it had got her nowhere. I think she lost all faith in the music industry.
Brooks, who liked her, delivered the verdict of a man who has watched it happen more than once. For some people, it’s just like that. They give, but they don’t get, and it just broke her heart.
He put the timing problem more brutally still. By the moment the business was finally ready to light her up, her personal fire was not up to it.
She kept playing for a year or two. In November 1971, the critic Ed Ochs watched her at the Gaslight Au Go Go and wrote that she picked the dust of ruins for traces of dreams and that the applause for her short set simply drove her off the stage, her two guitars banging together in her confusion.
Joe Loop remembered her being fired from a gig for spending too long tuning a 12-string, which cannot be hurried, in a town where 100 people were waiting to play for free. Stampfel spent the early 1970s in the backup band and described a pattern that would be funny if it were not fatal: two weeks of ferocious rehearsal, then on the night Karen would be too exhausted to get out of bed. A dose of amphetamine, taken with a needle, and the rehearsals were superb.
Three gigs, he reckoned, in the whole life of that group.
In 1972, she sang harmonies on a Holy Modal Rounders record and everyone waited over an hour while she prepared herself, a ritual that ended, in Stampfel’s account, with her ripping the bathroom sink off the wall. It was the last professional session of her life. She was 34.
What follows is 20 years with the lights off. The usual story is simple and satisfying and mostly wrong. It goes that she became a junkie, drifted, and died homeless in a doorway.
What actually happened is stranger and sadder and much more ordinary.
She shared a loft on 33rd Street and 7th Avenue with a guitarist named Hunt Middleton through the 1970s and into the 1980s. On any given evening the room might hold a clarinetist just off a gig with Dave Brubeck, a Cuban conga player who had worked with Tito Puente, and a blind piano genius who had taught Herbie Hancock and whose life Karen had once saved. Every one of them was there for the same reason: playing with her was the best thing available in New York, and it was free.
It was in a living room, which is where she had always said she wanted the audience anyway, wrapped and silent and entirely ignorable.
She lived in a rent-controlled apartment. At one point she handed out restaurant flyers in the street for money. Later, there was a place in the Bronx, and her diaries from those years record a run of terrifying encounters with burglars and dealers around the building.
She told friends to get out of the city, and several of them did on her instruction.
Lacy J. Dalton called an ambulance for her after an overdose, and got a phone call three weeks later that is Karen Dalton entire: I guess I ought to thank you for something. She was furious about being brought back.
Her friends do not agree about the drugs. Brooks knew her only as an addicted personality with a painful nature. Lacy believed she was on heroin and Valium by the late 1980s and refusing help.
Stampfel, looking back, concluded she had been clinically depressed the whole time he knew her, and that the depression was driving her.
Luke bristled at that. Being broke and hungry for 30 years is depressing on its own terms, and she grieved for the planet more than most people do. Peter Walker, who knew her for three decades and buried her, has spent his old age flatly refusing the whole narrative.
I never saw her with a needle in her arm, he said. A beer, a joint, sure.
Beyond that, he would not testify, and he would not let anyone else testify either.
She still occasionally sang. Walker’s last sight of her on stage was at the Joyous Lake in Woodstock in the early 1980s, fragile, functional, unmistakable. The owner went from table to table before she played, shaking his fist under people’s noses and promising violence to anyone who made a sound.
Nobody did.
She could still take a room full of drinkers and stop it dead, which is a power that does not diminish and cannot be sold.
Sometime in the mid-1980s, she was diagnosed with HIV, most probably from a shared needle. She lived with it for the better part of a decade, which in that decade was close to a miracle. She did it in the country, in a house upstate lent by a friend serving a prison sentence, complete with a heated swimming pool, an image so at odds with the legend that almost nobody repeats it.
In the early 1990s, Lacy J. Dalton mounted a rescue. Guitars redeemed from the pawn shop, the cat retrieved from Pennsylvania, a plane ticket to a rehabilitation facility in Texas, and a recording session waiting for her at the end of it.
Karen lasted about two days.
Then the telephone rang. I ought to stick my cowboy boot up your ass, she said. One of us ought to change your name.
Get me a plane ticket home now.
Lacy begged her to stay long enough to have her teeth fixed. She realized only afterwards that the teeth were how her friend was getting codeine.
She came home to a mobile home in a clearing off Eagle’s Nest Road in Hurley, between Kingston and Woodstock. Joe Loop telephoned her there a few months before the end. She was entirely herself.
She was, she told him, staying in this cabin this guy got me to croak in.
Her son Lee, the boy raised by her mother, the boy she sang Red Are the Flowers for, had come to look after her.
On March 19, 1993, Peter Walker let himself in to give her medication and found her apparently asleep. He sat down to wait and put the television on. He watched The Price Is Right.
The show finished and I went to see if she’d woken up, he said. She never did.
She was 55.
In her journals, which she had been given along with her guitars and her copyrights, she had written that her heart was a jackhammer drilling and tearing up the pavement of people’s lives. And elsewhere, more quietly, that she had become a cynic, spoiled in the wasteland.
The afterlife has been kinder and crueler than the life. Reissues began in 1997. Then came the tapes Joe Loop had been sitting on for four decades, and everyone discovered what her friends had always known: that the woman playing alone with a banjo in a cabin in 1963 was better than anything a studio ever got out of her.
There were two fires. One took hundreds of cassettes of rehearsals and living room performances stored in a shed. Another, in 2018, took the journals, though a pair of young filmmakers had photographed most of them first, which is the only reason we can quote her at all.
Nick Cave called her his absolute favorite blues singer. Adele, Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Lucinda Williams, Sharon Van Etten, and Angel Olsen have all queued up to say the same thing in different words. The woman who could not sell a record now streams in numbers that would have bought her tea a hundred times over.
She would have found the whole business very funny and not remotely useful.
When she signed her copyrights over to Peter Walker, sick and skint and clear-eyed about what was coming, he asked her what she wanted done with them. She had already worked it out in her own time, the way she worked out everything.
It won’t make any difference to me, Peter, she said. I won’t be here.
