Classic Album Review: Karen Dalton - It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best

Karen Dalton It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love you The Best
Originally released 1969 on Capitol Records

1. Little Bit Of Rain
2. Sweet Substitute
3. Ribbon Bow
4. I Love You More Than Words Can Say
5. In The Evening (It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best)
6. Blues On The Ceiling
7. It Hurts Me Too
8. How Did The Feeling Feel To You
9. Right, Wrong or Ready
10. Down On The Street (Don't Follow Me Down)

Yesterday I talked about The Beach Boy's Today, an album often overlooked in favor of it's critically acclaimed successor. The same could be said of today's selection, It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best by Karen Dalton.

It's followup, In My Own Time, is most often considered to be the pinnacle of Karen's woefully brief recording career - a career that has only recently come to be appreciated on a wider scale. Vinyl copies of Karen's two studio albums had changed hands, been copied and passed around for decades, eventually forming the kind of cult appreciation afforded to those dubbed 'musician's musicians'.

Finally, over the last few years her albums have seen the kind of deluxe reissue treatment they deserve thanks to small labels Light In The Attic Records in the US and Megaphone in Europe, and both a live album and a disc of home recordings have been added to her discography. All are worth checking out.

However, neither of Karen's original albums were particularly successful upon their first release, and the woman who Bob Dylan described as his favorite singer from the Greenwich village folk scene of the 1960's passed into obscurity. She would never release a further album during her lifetime, which was cut short in 1993 when she passed away, reportedly following an 8 year battle with AIDS.

Of her 2 studio offerings, 1971's In My Own Time is lushly produced, jazz oriented, and provides a warm, accessible environment for Karen's unusual voice, which is frequently compared to that of Billie Holiday. It is indeed an underground classic, but to find the woman Bob Dylan spoke so highly of, you have to look to her debut. It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best takes an altogether sparser, more stark approach. It's uncompromising, raw and challenging while also beautiful and vulnerable. Karen plays the banjo like no one else I've ever heard, and much like Lady Day, her material has those unflinching, not-to-be-messed-with, yet sensitive and sympathetic characteristics at its core.

Her versions of traditional folk songs 'Ribbon Bow' and 'In The Evening' are particularly affecting, and her take on 'It Hurts Me Too' rivals Elmore James' as a personal favorite. If you're in the mood for it, the stark intimacy and hushed tones of the album are absolutely arresting, and the delivery of the material has an authenticity that personally I've never found from her contemporaries like Joan Baez and Judy Collins. Uncloaked and uncompromising, Sweet Mother K.D. is the pure heart and the dark soul of folk blues.