Karen Dalton

At the risk of selling this seminal album short, it's a prerequisite spoke in the wheel of any freak folkie's collection. And although she's garnered many a Billie Holiday comparison, the aching inflections of the late Karen Dalton owe much more to the bruised baritone of Village folk staple Fred Neil (and not just because she covers a couple of his songs here). It's So Hard to Tell Who's Going to Love You the Best is a mostly acoustic affair tethered to country folk instrumentations, but her impassioned vocal timbre blows past any specific genre.