Karen Dalton - It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best (1969)

In 1962, Peter Walker sold a guitar to Karen Dalton.

Karen Dalton embodied the Greenwich Village folk movement. A single mother, divorced twice by the age of 22, she began commuting and performing between her home in Boulder and the Village in the early sixties. Her life was earthy and simple and tragic, and those qualities sounded in her beautiful, heartbreaking voice. Unlike most folkies, she was not brought into the movement. She grew into it. She earned respect from fellow musicians with the authenticity in her voice and lifestyle that she accompanied with a 12-string guitar or banjo.

The mythos surrounding Dalton emphasizes her dislike of recording which would explain why her discography and popularity are so small. Although there are stories of Karen being tricked into recording without her knowing, she secretly wished for a big recording contract that never came. Her contempt, instead, was more likely directed towards the industry that would try and polish her sound and market her for a broad audience. She would not concede her voice.

Still, with friends and connections in the Village, Karen Dalton recorded her debut album It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best in 1969, produced by Nick Venet (remember him?). The album is a collection of covers that she performed regularly in her live sets. The performances sound fuller than on her live and home recordings earlier in the sixties because she's backed with a strong bass, percussion, and a team of session guitarists to fill in the holes. Karen did not write her own songs but collected songs for her repertoire from traditional sources, her contemporaries (Fred Neil, Tim Hardin,...), and blues staples. She would only play songs whose content she connected with on an intimate level and would arrange them in a way that complemented her singing voice. She might not have written her own songs, but her arrangements and performances were so personal that she might as well have.

Here is the discography surrounding Karen Dalton's debut album:

Cotton Eyed Joe (1962 live recordings)
Green Rocky Road (1963 home recordings)
1966 (1966 home recordings)
It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best



If you have any ideas for where the tour should go next, please give a shout. I'm open to whatever as long as the artists are historically related in some way and go in an artist's chronological order.

Pass the Headphones!!