The Delta Sweete is the second studio album by American singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry. Vignettes of the Southern Delta and lives-lived.
Originally released on Capitol Records in early 1968, the album followed Gentry’s landmark debut LP - Ode to Billie Joe - that had won two Grammy awards the previous year and established her as a unique talent and an authentic voice. Raised in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, her ascension had been fast, with her studio debut quickly constructed based on guitar and banjo demos that she had submitted - with the original intention that they would be performed by other singers. But her voice was just irrepressible, close-miked, smoky and so full of emotion across the whole stereo.
The Delta Sweete - a pun on “Sweet” and “Suite” - is broadly a concept album about various characters she had met and experiences she had lived in the southern states, but there isn’t exactly a linear story; more interestingly, it’s curated not only with her own writing but also with cover songs. She weaves in the Delta blues with Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” and Bukka White’s “Parchman Farm”, also more swirling country with Doug Kershaw’s “Louisiana Man”. The Delta Sweete is so often like a patchwork.
The album isn’t just thematically based in the Delta, sonically it mixes in blues, country and soul music influences across her originals. Early album highlight ‘Reunion’ is a curious mix of playground rhythmics (layers of off-kilter vocals designed to recreate family get-togethers) as it evolves into epic chamber pop. It’s one of the album's first psychedelic moments, but it’s certainly not the last. The way the songs capture laughter and hand claps is so full of life and was stylistically far ahead of its time. The euphoric and gospel-influenced “Sermon” didn’t sound much like anything else at the time either, dripping with dark magic. The Delta Sweete was very much Gentry’s vision and all of its ambitious victories pay testament to what what a rare talent she was.
From the very first seconds of the album with the raw and twanging “Okolona River Bottom Band”, through to the dreamlike and folky ambience on album closer “Courtyard”, The Delta Sweete is just magic and totally transfixing. Atmospheric, alluring, grooving, swooning, sad and beautiful.
As the sleeve states; ‘Bobbie Gentry Performs the Delta Sweete’. She channeled something and it is always such a joy to go on that tour with her.
