Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited CD With Autographed Digipak

Mercury Rev’s tribute to Bobbie Gentry’s 1968 gem The Delta Sweete. Featuring an amazingly talented group of vocalists — Hope Sandoval (Mazzy Star), Norah Jones, Lucinda Williams, Laetitia Sadier (Stereolab), Phoebe Bridgers, Margo Price, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Beth Orton, Marissa Nadler, Vashti Bunyan, Kaela Sinclair (M83), Susanne Sundfør, and Carice van Houten (Game of Thrones).

Bobbie Gentry is an American singer-songwriter who was one of the first female artists to compose and produce her own material. The Delta Sweete was her second album.

“Ode to Bilie Joe”—Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 debut as a singer-songwriter and a Number One single for three weeks in the late Summer of Love — was the most psychedelic record of that year not from San Francisco or London. In October, 1967, while “Billie Joe” was still in the Top Five, Gentry began recording The Delta Sweete, a connected set of a dozen songs that extended the narrative dynamics of that single with personal reflection and set her folk-siren charisma in a richer frame of dream-state orchestration, swamp-rock guitars and bigcity-R&B horns. In her eight original songs for the album, Gentry drew from her childhood and church life on her grandparents’ farm in Chickasaw County, Mississippi: the girl-ish craving for a beautiful dress in “Reunion”; the riseand-shine of “Mornin’Glory”; the stern Sunday lessons in “Sermon,” based on a traditional hymn also known as “Run On.”

Gentry also turned them to new purpose and even gender. “Gonna get myself a man, one gonna treat me right,” she sang in Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” with heated assurance. But The Delta Sweete — Gentry’s LP, the first country-rock opera, was ignored on arrival, not even cracking Billboard’s Top 100.

This Delta Sweete is her long-delayed justice — Mercury Rev’s committed and affectionate resurrection of an album that anticipated by three decades their own pivotal expedition through transcendental America, 1998’s Deserter’s Songs. From their recording lair in New York’s Catskill Mountains, the founding core of Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper with Jesse Chandler (previously in the Texas group Midlake) honor Gentry’s foresight and creative triumph with spacious invention and hallucinatory flair.