Even the keenest Karen Dalton fans have been surprised by the recently revealed new footage of her performing at The Montreux Golden Rose Pop Festival in 1971. The date of the performance is 1st May 1971, she was supporting Santana on their European tour (which included the Hammersmith Odeon in London). Others in the video are believed to include John Hall on guitar and Bill Keith on bass and pedal steel. In order of appearance she performs:
- Something on your mind
- Blues on the ceiling
- Are you leaving for the country?
- One night of love
video no longer available
We haven’t been left with prolific recordings by Karen Dalton who died in 1993. She released just two studio albums – It’s So Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You the Best (1969), In My Own Time (1971). Following her death, a 1962 live recording was released – Cotton Eyed Joe (2007) and then Green Rocky Road (2008) featuring home recordings made between 1962-66 and then 1966 (2012) featuring unreleased recordings.
The guitarist Peter Walker published a superb book in 2012 – Karen Dalton – Songs, Poems, and Writings (available here). While she may have had a reclusive nature, making footage such as this is very rare, Peter’s book demonstrates the rich legacy she left.
Walker was a close friend to Karen who he first met in 1961 and kept in contact with her right through to her final days. In fact, Walker fought for Karen in court when in 1993 (the same year she died) the Department of Social Services tried to declare her incompetent and forcibly remove her from her then trailer home. Karen was too ill to attend court but Walker was successful in winning her the right to die in her own home as she wanted.
In the book’s opening, Walker writes a lovely biography on Karen based around the time he knew her from 1961 – 1993. Of the many good times, one which stands out for the reader is the time they spent at Bob Brainen’s house in Woodstock around 1970. Bob kept an open house where the likes of Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Walker and Karen would gather and play till dawn. As well as being a unique and iconic figure, Karen was also a root source for many singers including Tim Hardin who she was close friends with. Bob Dylan once described her as having “a voice like Billie Holiday’s and plays the guitar like Jimmy Reed and went all the way with it”.
While Walker doesn’t stray into addictions to alcohol and drugs which are often mentioned, he does highlight the terrible poverty she lived through – “She struggled with poverty more than any addiction of physical infirmity..”
When living in NYC, she struggled to keep her apartment in the Bronx and made money handing our fliers. Through her diaries, Karen revealed the struggles she went through living in a violent neighborhood with hostile landlords and ridden with dangerous junkies and thieves. She was once arrested (1989) while handing out fliers (he thinks for littering or blocking the sidewalk), her wrists were bound so tight by handcuffs that her hands were deeply blued and blackened – the policeman refused to loosen them for several hours.
Her life was not all tragedy and suffering – as Walker says ‘she laughed and hung out’. She was also a voracious reader and deep thinker. He touches on her wisdom a number of times and talks of how she often guided others out of the city and into a healthy country life…it would seem she lived up to the name ‘Mama Karen’.
A documentary, In My Own Time: A Portrait of Karen Dalton, from filmmakers Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz (Wim Wenders is executive producer) premiered in November 2020. Greenwich Entertainment have now acquired North American rights to the film. You can keep up to speed here: https://www.facebook.com/karendaltondocumentary/
More Karen Dalton album releases here.