Karen Dalton – It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best
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Posted On November 1, 1997
“Karen always seemed like a Gothic cathedral in ruins, and I always felt that I needed to restore her.”
— Peter Stampfel,
from the liner notes
Karen Dalton’s voice bends and breaks, trembles with tension and curls itself round her banjo and guitar much like a cat at your feet, skittering, dancing and purring before dropping to roll. It reaches like a haint from beyond the grave, grabbing you down into the red clay to confront your greatest fears. To hear her deep country blues is to experience every heartbreak and hangover and helpless yearning you have ever felt. And when you have heard, you will have had an intimate if painful adventure with truth.
Dalton was tricked into making this, her first of only two professional recordings during her lifetime (she died in 1993). In the early ’70s, producer Nik Venet (Beach Boys, etc.) lured her into the studio under the guise of playing on a Fred Neil record. Neil had initially heard Dalton perform his song “Blues on the Ceiling”, which also appears here, at a club in NYC’s East Village in the early ’60s. He cites her as his favorite female vocalist, as well as a “heavy influence on my own style of singing.”
It’s So Hard To Tell Who’s Going To Love You The Best begins with a rendition of another Fred Neil gem, “Little Bit of Rain”, which Dalton was told would be recorded for Venet’s private collection. The songs following were recorded during a single session and are largely the first and only takes.
Besieged by depression, excessive amounts of booze and drugs, and having great contempt for performing or recording, Dalton is said to have been at her most remarkable when casually jamming with friends. This may well be, yet the brilliance of her first release cannot be denied. As a picker of both the twelve-string guitar and the five-string banjo, Dalton comes by the folk tradition naturally rather than through bohemian cool. Of Irish and Cherokee heritage, she first learned the fiddle, probably from her grandmother who both sang and fiddled. Yet it is the voice that resonates so clearly her of instinctual gift. Comparisons to Billie Holiday are inevitable, much as Dalton disliked them.
