Bobbie Gentry’s ‘The Delta Sweete’ Due Out July 31

June 11, 2020 9:14 am

Los Angeles – June 11, 2020 – 2018’s GRAMMY®-nominated The Girl From Chickasaw County box set reacquainted the world with the beguiling work of enigmatic singer-songwriter, Bobbie Gentry. Universally acclaimed, the box set housed all seven of the studio albums she recorded for Capitol, including the one which has over the years become recognised as her brilliant conceptual masterpiece: The Delta Sweete.

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On July 31, Capitol/UMe will release an expanded edition of The Delta Sweete on 2CD and deluxe 2LP vinyl. The expanded CD edition features a new stereo mix of the album (sourced directly from the original four-track and eight-track tapes) by Andrew Batt, the GRAMMY®-nominated producer/compiler behind The Girl From Chickasaw County, alongside the original mono mix making its debut on CD. There are a total of 10 bonus tracks to treasure, including a previously unreleased original demo, “The Way I Do,” and a special instrumental version of “Okolona River Bottom Band” featuring the great Shorty Rogers on bass trumpet. The deluxe vinyl is the first official repress of the album since 1972 and features the new stereo mix on LP1 and the 10 bonus tracks on LP2. Listen to “The Way I Do” and pre-order The Delta Sweete now: https://bobbiegentry.lnk.to/TheDeltaSweete

Released in February 1968, barely six months after Gentry’s debut LP, The Delta Sweete may not have contained anything as career-defining as the song “Ode to Billie Joe,” but it represented a definite step forward in its musical ambition: A multi-faceted, quasi-concept album, where each track blurred, dreamlike, into the next, the songs evoked the melancholy adolescent world of Gentry’s childhood in Chickasaw County while further deepening her fascination with loss, illusion and the often comic absurdity of the conventions of everyday life. Even the album’s name was pure Gentry, the “Sweete” in the title punning on both Gentry’s southern belle good looks (a pretty girl in the South might be referred to as a sweete) and the album’s musical song structure. The artwork also poetically evoked the music it contained, featuring a double exposure of a contemplative black and white image of Gentry in tight close-up, superimposed onto a color photo of a run-down shack taken on her grandparents’ farm where she grew up.

West Coast jazz pioneer Shorty Rogers was a notable addition to the Gentry sound, helping to move The Delta Sweete away from the largely acoustic feel of her debut, and together they opened up her songs to a broader pallet of instrumentation. The strings were once again orchestrated by Jimmie Haskell whose memorable arrangement on “Ode to Billie Joe,” would win him a GRAMMY® in the spring of ‘68. The great Elvis TCB band leader James Burton features on guitar and Hal Blaine is socking it on drums. The resulting production gave Gentry a unique and distinctive sound that merged country, soul, chamber-pop and psychedelia, quite unlike anyone else. The album begins back “in Chickasaw land” with the swampy southern groove of “Okolona River Bottom Band” and progresses through a mixture of originals such as “Reunion,” “Jessye’ Lisabeth,” “Refractions” and “Mornin’ Glory,” entwined with some carefully chosen covers like Mose Allison’s “Parchman Farm” and two of Willie Dixon’s – “Big Boss Man” and session outtake, “The Seventh Son.” Other bonus tracks included Gentry’s beautifully laid-back demo of the Anthony Newley/Leslie Bricusse classic, “Feelin’ Good,” and an alternate version of her own “Mississippi Delta” that was originally intended to close out the LP’s second side.

Whilst the album flopped commercially upon its original release, today The Delta Sweete is considered by fans and critics alike to represent the pinnacle of Gentry’s artistry; recently placed 4^th in Uncut magazine’s “Ultimate Genre Guide” to the top 40 singer-songwriter albums of all time, the album is justly acknowledged as one of the great previously unsung masterpieces of the ‘60s. Just over 50 years after its release, US indie rock band Mercury Rev with special guests that included Hope Sandoval, Beth Orton, Vashti Bunyan, Laetitia Sadler and Lucinda Williams paid homage with their re-recorded tribute album, The Delta Sweete Revisited, helping a whole new audience to discover the brilliance of Gentry’s Delta soul. Mercury Rev frontman Jonathan Donahue described Gentry’s original LP as “a gem of an album. It feels like an island that someone left off a map. It was always flourishing and is still vibrantly alive… It’s just that people didn’t know to sail over there to see it.” The Delta Sweete is now firmly back on the map, and many more will be ready to make that journey – if you haven’t already, it’s time to set sail.

THE DELTA SWEETE DELUXE EDITION 2LP TRACK LISTING

LP1

SIDE A