Mercury Rev: Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited

If the critical cliché “forgotten masterpiece” didn’t exist, Bobbie Gentry would have had to invent it. The pioneering country singer from Mississippi was just 25 when her sweeping, Gothic-tinged 1967 hit “Ode to Billie Joe” knocked the goddamn Beatles out of the No. 1 slot and made her a star—and just 36 when she retired from the limelight for good.
In between, Gentry released seven studio albums, one of which, 1968’s conceptually minded The Delta Sweete, received limited success upon release but has since been heralded as—well, yes, a “forgotten masterpiece.” Though it failed to yield another Billboard smash, The Delta Sweete did deliver a lush, interconnected suite of vignettes reflecting on, and dramatizing, the singer’s farm upbringing in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Gentry wrote and recorded her own material (the record also contains four covers) at a time when listeners weren’t accustomed to female singers maintaining such creative control, and she paired her sensual, closely-miked voice with ambitious orchestral and brass flourishes. In new liner notes, veteran critic David Fricke calls it “the first country-rock opera.”
It would be a substantial understatement to say that country listeners of 1968 were not prepared. Now, a half century later, The Delta Sweete is receiving something more than the typical retrospective box set and anniversary thinkpiece: Mercury Rev has recruited a murderers’ row of guest vocalists to reinterpret Gentry’s album track-by-track, with the band holding fort as a sort of psychedelic house band. Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited is a layered, affectionate and often gorgeous tribute to an album that never got its due, even if the band’s string-drenched grandeur occasionally smoothes over the swamp-rock grittiness of Gentry’s music.
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