“I must have played Something on Your Mind a million times,” Cave has said. “It’s just the most extraordinary vocal I’ve ever heard.” Yet despite such heady praise, Dylan’s “favourite singer” during the Greenwich Village folk boom of the early 1960s and, more recently, Banhart’s “angel, alchemist, witch” on thrift-shop vinyl, Karen Dalton, has languished in obscurity for more than 30 years.
Of course, you’re expecting an “until now” in this story, and here it comes: Dalton’s second and final album, In My Own Time, is reissued this month (on Light in the Attic), with liner notes by Cave and Banhart. Fans such as Lucinda Williams and Cat Power can file it alongside her debut, It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best, rereleased in July. Sadly, however, Dalton won’t be taking her belated bow in the limelight. A heroin addict for at least two decades, she died in New York in 1993.
While music was Dalton’s “saving grace” — as Harvey Brooks, the producer of In My Own Time, recalls — she was a diffident public performer, happiest when jamming with friends, and nervous about recording. Her first album was achieved essentially by stealth, through taping one such session in 1969. That the follow-up was made at all, two years later in Woodstock, is down to Brooks’s patient coaxing and the fact that the budget — an incredible-for-those-days $40,000 — allowed her multiple takes. Alas, after finishing the album, Dalton was in no state to promote it, and she gradually slipped off most radars. I heard about her last year when interviewing the British alt-folk singer Petra Jean Phillipson, a Dalton acolyte. “It’s difficult to work with such depths of emotion when you’re not an actor,” she says. “You’re not trained to just switch on the melancholy.”
On Saturday, Phillipson is headlining a Dalton tribute at the Luminaire, in London: “It’s primarily to raise awareness, like a memorial or a service, almost.” She will attempt, with others, including the former Beta Band member Richard Greentree, to re-create the coffee-house atmosphere in which Dalton hit her stride. “I’m interested in trying to imitate her,” Phillipson says. “She does what a lot of jazz singers do: sings off the beat, only just catching the phrase. I love that.”
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Dalton is frequently compared to Billie Holiday, but she isn’t as lilting as Lady Day. In truth, Dalton makes a sort of sensuous honk. Untamed by the studio, her voice remains a feral caw. Weirdly antique on the banjo numbers Katie Cruel and Same Old Man, it’s a grieving civil-war crone. On country-soul versions of How Sweet It Is and One Night of Love, it’s a sharecropper’s gal getting slinky. Why was she overlooked? Well, since the 1970s, singer-songwriters have been pop’s top dogs, and Dalton didn’t write her own material — she was an interpreter. Being from Oklahoma, and half Cherokee, she was an outsider who didn’t care for “the business”. Luckily, plenty in it still care for her, because, as Fred Neil observed: “She sure can sing the s*** out of the blues.”
For details of Saturday’s tribute gig, visit www.theluminaire.co.uk