Tonight’s selections from Mercury Rev’s 2019 album, Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited. An album with Mercury Rev with a “who’s who” of guest singers covering Bobby Gentry’s 1969 album, The Delta Sweete.
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. — Paste
Okolona River Bottom Band Feat. Norah Jones
Mercury Rev are not having your typical late career. At the end of 2018 they embarked upon a twentieth anniversary tour for their classic 1998 album Deserter’s Songs: not wacky in and of itself, but they elected to play wilfully tiny venues that they’d doubtless have sold out with little bother even if they were touting a new record.
And now we actually have the new record and it’s... a song-for-song (almost) cover of the cult 1968 album The Delta Sweete by Southern singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry, in which Jonathan Donahue cedes vocal duties to a rotating cast of female singers.
Why? As far as I can tell from a couple of supporting interviews, the band were fans of the album, covered it for their own amusement some years back, contacted a series of female singers about performing on it, and were taken aback when they all said yes and figured they should release the thing.
Anyway: I am absolutely not going to pretend that I was in any way familiar with the original, and perhaps like your favourite Bond, it’s a case of whichever you heard first. But I like it: there is something potent and cohesive about it. Both artists would seem to be intensely evocative of the landscapes that birthed them - Gentry of the sweltering Delta, Mercury Rev of the haunted Catskills. And the meeting works, too, an intense, hazy hybrid of two musical vision. — Drowned in Sound
Big Boss Man Feat. Hope Sandoval
Bobbie Gentry was one of the true auteurs of her era. She wrote and produced her own material, and was an avowed feminist in the patriarchal world of Country music. The Delta Sweete was her second album, and a follow up to her biggest hit, ‘Ode to Billie Joe’, which topped the Billboard charts for three weeks in the summer of love. Set in rural Mississippi, the song tells the story of Billie Joe McAllister, who jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Or rather, it doesn’t quite tell us the story. Instead, the song’s narrator, a young woman who is assumed to have been in some kind of romantic relationship with Billie Joe, relates the moment at the dinner table when she hears the news of his suicide. Her family dissect the various bits of gossip they have recently encountered regarding the young man, and calmly and politely eat their black-eyed peas and enquire why she is off her food today. It’s quite clear that everyone present knows exactly what has happened. ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ is an understated, unforgettable and delicately furious feat of songwriting.
It’s here of course, given a yearning and plaintive interpretation by Lucinda Williams at the album’s close. The preceding songs expand on its themes and instead of answers to the riddle of Billie Joe, we catch glimpses of Gentry’s world. Norah Jones gives a sweltering account of the ‘told-you-society / green apple piety’ at the try-outs for the ‘Okolona River Bottom Band’. Carice van Houten takes us to ‘Parchman Farm’, which, card by deadly card, reveals its hand as a murder ballad. We get a psychedelic take on the old-time religion of ‘Sermon’ with Margo Price, itself Gentry’s reworking of the traditional folk hymn ‘God’s Gonna Cut You Down’. Beth Orton waits patiently in a ‘Courtyard’ for the man who built it, who would ‘come to my side / He would if he could’. Not too far away, the ever-explosive Susanne Sundfør plots revenge on the poverty and degradation of ‘Tobacco Road’. And Laetitia Sadier takes the opportunity to show off her vocal range in a performance of the ballad ‘Morning Glory’ so unexpectedly filled with sunshine that you’ll be reaching for your Aviators. I could go on, suffice to say none of the contributors puts a foot wrong. — God Is in the TV
Sermon Feat. Margo Price
One of the most striking things about this album is how little it sounds like either Bobbie Gentry, or Mercury Rev. There’s no attempt to recreate her distinctive finger-picking guitar style or quirky arrangements, and for their part, the Rev make for generous hosts. Jonathan Donahue and Grasshopper largely restrain themselves from the kind of far-out, cosmic extravaganza that we might have expected, instead building everything around their guest stars’ voices. The cumulative effect is that of an old-time country and western show reimagined as a dreamy, psychedelic, alt-country Opry. The only track that wouldn’t sound out of place on one of their albums, perhaps unsurprisingly, is ‘Refractions’, in which Marissa Nadler dreams she is a bird made of crystal. ‘I had a most distressing dream last night’, she breathes, and you just know that a theremin is coming in over those ghostly strings very soon. [...]
Mercury Rev have curated an album that isn’t all about them and isn’t all about Bobbie Gentry either. It’s a record that stands as a celebration of the trailblazing spirit of figures like Gentry and Bunyan, women who made early inroads into the music industry on their own terms, and it’s a record that comes across as firmly led by their successors. More importantly, it’s pure bloody pleasure from start to finish, a literate, Southern Gothic, backwoods opera with a cast of characters that would give Tennessee Williams or Flannery O’Connor a run for their money. And if you’re unfamiliar with Bobbie Gentry, start here. Take a slice, leave a crumb. — God Is in the TV
Parchman Farm Feat. Carice Van Houten
Bobbie Gentry had unqualified freedom to record her second album, and she wasn’t going to waste it. Her 1967 smash, “Ode to Billie Joe,” not only introduced the breakout pop star but also gave listeners one of the era’s enduring mysteries: What exactly had she and Billie Joe McAllister thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge? For her follow-up to that hit and its best-selling album, she envisioned something unique and highly ambitious: an avant-garde country-pop record full of technicolor arrangements, oddball collages, and playful sexual innuendos. Mixing originals with Southern standards made famous by J.D. Loudermilk, Doug Kershaw, and Mose Allison, The Delta Sweete depicts the Deep South as a fantastical place: not how it was in the late 1960s, but how Gentry remembers it from her idyllic Mississippi childhood.
That feeling is one of the few things Mercury Rev get right on their full-album tribute to The Delta Sweete, which features a different singer from various generations and genres on each song. From the first notes of opener “Okolona River Bottom Band,” you get the sense of a place that exists outside of time and space. In this tale about a small town holding tryouts for the local band, the humid shimmer of the droning strings and sequencers, not to mention Norah Jones’ languid vocals, depict Okolona—a very real place in Gentry’s native Chickasaw County—as though it were Brigadoon. — Pitchfork
Ode to Billie Joe Feat. Lucinda Williams
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WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Adam Scott, Sen. Adam Schiff, Michael Marcagi
Jimmy Fallon: Selena Gomez, Benny Blanco, Elizabeth Olsen, Bob Mould
Stephen Colbert: Jake Tapper, Paris Paloma (R 3/5/25)
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After Midnight: Robby Hoffman, Jordan Temple, Carmen Christopher (R 12/5/24)
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The Daily Show: Peter Wolf, host Jordan Klepper
