HOW DID THE FEELING FEEL TO YOU?

A friend of Fred Neil and Peter Stampfel and an acquaintance of Dylan in his Greenwich Village days (mind you, who wasn’t – that boy sure knew how to network), Karen Dalton was one of the more humble and elusive presences in the ‘60s American folk scene and didn’t get an opportunity to cut what turned out to be her sole studio album, “It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best”, until 1969.

It looks like this:



Reissued last month and getting some deserved attention from reborn folk fans, it is quite possibly the most beautiful and sad music you will ever hear.

Ok, ok, hyperbole – so maybe not THE, but as good a bet as any if you’re looking for contenders.

Although not a song-writer as such (at least not on the evidence of this album), and not possessed of any particularly unique stylistic innovations, Dalton nevertheless manages to sing like Billie Holiday and plays guitar like Nick Drake, and possesses the ability to imbue simple songs with an almost inexpressible gravitas in the manner of the great Jackson C. Frank – a combination which is surely worthy of launching a thousand ships.

Karen Dalton is essentially a blues singer, and if we limit our survey to white people born after the great depression, she is also one of the best. In a decade when every dude with a guitar (and a few ladies) seemed to be huffing and puffing trying to tap into the overwhelming machismo wounds of the blues, Karen understood the unfakable route back to spirit of the delta pioneers: she just opens up and sings quietly to herself, because she feels bad and needs to try to feel better. (See C. Summerlin’s exemplary work on the blues for further discussion of this point.)

Whilst an inattentive listener may accuse Dalton of swaying a little toward the bland mere nice-ness to which lady folkies are oft subject, and a stupid listener may even like that about her, the loss and deep unhappiness expressed within this album strikes me as very real. It sounds like the lament of someone who has spent a lot of time loving and a lot of time losing, and who is now just tired out with the whole thing.

Not at all ‘intense’ or ‘cathartic’ in the sense of modern music, the dominant mood here is one of fragile resignation. This is the blues of a woman who sits alone at the kitchen table contemplating a life of loneliness and burden, who lights a joint and for a moment is completely, silently happy just watching the smoke curling in the air and the still-life of tablecloth and wilting flowers, until the push and pull of the real world intrudes again.

You’ll find the same feeling in this album you found in Cat Power’s ‘Moonpix’ and ‘The Covers Record’ a few years back. You’ll listen to it before you go to bed each night and it will go straight to your broken heart like pot smoke to your brain, soothing and numbing and making things fuzzy round the edges and bearable – the best way to go to sleep when alone in a cold room.