BOBBIE GENTRY: The Delta Sweete (Capitol)
Verdict: Country-soul classic
MARY CHAPIN CARPENTER: The Dirt And The Stars (Thirty Tigers)
Rating: 
Verdict: Tender heartland rock
PAUL McCARTNEY: Flaming Pie (MPL)
Rating: 
Verdict: Britpop-era nugget revisited
The tale of Bobbie Gentry is one of the most curious in pop. She emerged in 1967 with voluminous dark hair and a self-penned single, Ode To Billie Joe, which was a hit despite having no obvious chorus
The tale of Bobbie Gentry is one of the most curious in pop. She emerged in 1967 with voluminous dark hair and a self-penned single, Ode To Billie Joe, which was a hit despite having no obvious chorus.
A subsequent LP, also titled Ode To Billie Joe, knocked The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper off the No 1 spot in America.
She later topped the UK chart with Burt Bacharach’s I’ll Never Fall In Love Again, hosted her own BBC variety show and looked set for a lengthy career until, in 1982, she quit music.
Her last appearance came at that year’s Country Music Awards and she hasn’t sung in public since.
Now 78, she reportedly lives quietly in Memphis, but her absence hasn’t stopped her reputation from growing.
Taylor Swift’s song The Lucky One was seemingly inspired by her sudden vanishing act, and a box set, The Girl From Chickasaw County, was well received in 2018. Now her most celebrated album, The Delta Sweete, is getting the deluxe reissue treatment.
First released in 1968 and widely regarded as a singer-songwriter’s masterpiece, it has already been the subject of one tribute, with American band Mercury Rev re-recording the entire record with guest singers, including Norah Jones and Lucinda Williams.
But it is the stunning original — now expanded with bonus tracks into a double CD (£14) and double vinyl LP (£28) — that’s the best testimony to her talent.
A concept album about everyday life in the small towns of the Mississippi delta, its character sketches have a clammy style that evokes muggy summer days.
It’s a heady mix. The album has some country elements, particularly in its storytelling, but it’s also steeped in blue-eyed soul and funky pop.
Opening track Okolona River Bottom Band sees Gentry and her band striking up a swampy southern groove, while Reunion uses the click-click rhythms of a skipping game to paint a chaotic picture of a family bickering around the dinner table.
Rather darkly, it also refers back to the ill-fated Billie Joe of her first hit: ‘I heard this morning they dropped the Tallahatchie River and found poor Billie gone,’ goes one line.
A cover of bluesman Mose Allison’s Parchman Farm tells of a man sent to a prison farm when ‘all he ever did was shoot his wife’, while the crying girl in folk fable Jessye ’Lisabeth seems to be harbouring a terrible secret.
Gentry’s sultry voice comes into its own on the slower songs. Mornin’ Glory is soothing and sensual. Penduli Pendulum and Refractions are dreamy and impressionistic. Courtyard’s tale of an imprisoned woman could be a metaphor for Gentry’s ambivalent attitude to fame.
Despite being marketed as a country singer, Mary Chapin Carpenter has also proved hard to pin down
The out-takes from the original sessions are worthwhile, too. Trumpeter Shorty Rogers adds jazzy swing to an instrumental version of Okolona River Bottom Band and Gentry shows her rock ‘n’ roll chops on Willie Dixon’s The Seventh Son.
When Mercury Rev did their remake of The Delta Sweete last year, frontman Jonathan Donahue called it ‘a gem of an album — an island someone left off the map’.With this reissue, a record that flopped in 1968 is back in the atlas to reinforce the legacy of the diva who disappeared.
Despite being marketed as a country singer, Mary Chapin Carpenter has also proved hard to pin down.
The privately educated daughter of a Life magazine executive from suburban New Jersey, she can’t rely on a hardscrabble back-story to enhance her blue-collar credentials.
Her music, too, cleaves as much to heartland rock as it does to Nashville — and her 15th album lies between the two.
The Dirt And The Stars is an intensely personal set of country-rockers and introspective ballads. There are ruminations on the ageing process, lost loves and ‘your truest friend, depression’. Titles such as It’s OK To Be Sad and All Broken Hearts Break Differently suggest a record of painful reflection.
But while Chapin Carpenter never sugar-coats her feelings, she is a robust songwriter whose melodic arrangements are adorned with tuneful piano and tasteful guitar.
On an hour-long album, though, saving your three best songs until the end isn’t shrewd. Those who persevere, or skip to track nine, will be rewarded by the ballads Asking For A Friend, Everybody’s Got Something and an epic title track.
The last of these, inspired by memories of hearing the Rolling Stones’ Wild Horses on the radio at 17, is lit up by a stunning solo by guitarist Duke Levine.
Paul McCartney continues to raid the archives with an expanded version of his 1997 solo album Flaming Pie.
Shaped by Britpop and Sir Paul’s role in curating The Beatles’ Anthology series, it’s a straightforward affair with a handful of notable songs and typically clever twists.
Repackaged in an array of formats, including a double CD (£13) and triple vinyl LP (£50), it signalled the start of McCartney’s late-career renaissance.
Jeff Lynne’s glistening production can be overbearing, but Calico Skies is a pretty acoustic number and Beautiful Night, with Ringo on drums, is Macca at his melodic best.
Billie’s blessed release from lockdown
Lockdown is bringing the best out of pop’s most creative songwriters.
With tours cancelled and time on their hands, Taylor Swift and Charli XCX have produced new music and now Billie Eilish is following suit, with her first single since the James Bond theme song No Time To Die.
There are two strands to her music — one a fondness for hazy, stripped-down electronics; the other an appreciation of classic American songcraft — and it’s the latter that’s to the fore on My Future, which opens as a mellow jazz tune before shifting to a funkier groove.
‘I’ve changed my plans ’cause I’m in love with my future,’ sings Billie on a stunning song recorded at home in LA with her producer brother Finneas.
There are two strands to her music — one a fondness for hazy, stripped-down electronics; the other an appreciation of classic American songcraft
‘We wrote this at the beginning of quarantine but it’s taken on a new meaning in the context of what’s happening now,’ she says.
Sheryl Crow has also been active, re-recording 2012’s Woman In The White House in response to Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s vow to name a female running mate for the U.S. election.
Elsewhere, Bastille adopt an edgy approach on new single What You Gonna Do, and Robert Plant gears up for his forthcoming Digging Deep anthology with the previously unreleased Charlie Patton Highway (Turn It Up — Part 1), a feverish blues-rock number.