Barely a 12 months after her 1967 vital and industrial smash, “Ode To Billie Joe,” Bobbie Gentry was not in Capitol Data’ good books. Her second album, the woozy and surreal The Delta Sweete, featured erotically-charged songs about band rehearsals (“Okolona River Backside Band”) and troublesome, complicated songs with overlapping voices (“Reunion”). It had bombed. Bobbie was displaying a worrying tendency in the direction of not caring about industrial success, and so Capitol sought to workforce their wayward cost with one in all their fastest-rising stars for the collaboration album Bobbie Gentry And Glen Campbell.
Take heed to Bobby Gentry And Glen Campbell proper now.
Like Gentry, Campbell had come from rural poverty; he had left residence as a teen to hitch his uncle’s band, ultimately pitching up in LA to work as a extremely versatile session guitarist. He had additionally toured with The Seaside Boys within the mid-60s, subbing for Brian Wilson. Extra importantly, from Capitol’s standpoint, Campbell was scorching: “Mild On My Thoughts” and “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” had been killer slices of nation melancholia they usually had each hit huge.
Campbell and Gentry had identified each other for a couple of years, earlier than both was well-known. The pair had already co-headlined a tour, and by its finish they had been commonly performing duets onstage (to the viewers’s delight); each had been open to Capitol’s thought of a recorded collaboration. Gentry was “free as a goose,” Campbell has stated. “She wasn’t uptight. She was very straightforward to work with.” This easy familiarity turned the defining characteristic of Bobbie Gentry And Glen Campbell, launched on September 16, 1968.
A mixture of covers and originals, the album solidified Campbell’s enchantment and steered Gentry away from her extra outré impulses. Campbell contributed two elegant songs, “Much less Of Me” and “(It’s Solely Your) Creativeness,” whereas Gentry penned one. “Mornin’ Glory,” which Gentry had initially recorded on The Delta Sweete, misplaced its former paranoid edge and, as an alternative, turned a paean to intimacy with Campbell. It’s a mark of the flexibility of Gentry’s songwriting that each variations are impressed.
“Little Inexperienced Apples,” “Let It Be Me,” “Coronary heart To Coronary heart Speak”: all are easy-listening silk, mild on the ear and good for the temper. Nevertheless, the best cowl on the album is the sunshine-pop traditional “Sunday Mornin’,” initially written by Margo Guryan and made well-known by Spanky And Our Gang. On one degree, it’s a gently optimistic hum. Gentry has by no means sounded sweeter, virtually anticipating the tender vocals of Karen Carpenter, whereas Campbell employs his most honeyed harmonies as they loosen up quietly collectively over espresso.
Nevertheless, the gentility of “Sunday Mornin’” has an edge to it. There’s a particular fixed-grin really feel by the top, with the repeated “The whole lot’s alright,” solely heightened by Campbell asking Gentry, “Bob, did you say, ‘The whole lot’s alright?’” because the music fades. In 1968 America, with the continuing Vietnam struggle and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, maybe Campbell and Gentry had been disorientated like the remainder of the inhabitants, removed from satisfied that the whole lot was alright. Underlining that is the choice to shut the album with their model of “Scarborough Honest/Canticle”: one in all Paul Simon’s subtlest anti-war statements.
Bobbie Gentry And Glen Campbell was a No.1 nation album and achieved the success that Capitol had wished. The pair adopted it up with one other hit collectively, a model of The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have To Do Is Dream,” however a second duets album was shelved. For Campbell, Bobbie Gentry And Glen Campbell was a quick stop-off on a profession ticking upwards; “Wichita Lineman,” launched shortly afterwards, quickly eclipsed it. As for Gentry, the album’s legacy was trickier. She discovered it more durable to drag herself utterly from its easy-listening quicksand, and none of her subsequent albums absolutely revisited The Delta Sweete’s ambition.
Bobbie Gentry And Glen Campbell is steadily ignored, but it surely’s unfair to dismiss the album as a water-treading train. It accommodates a few of the smoothest vocal performances ever laid down by both Gentry or Campbell and, realizing the character of every, maybe a touch of rebel spiking its saccharine.
The career-spanning Bobbie Gentry 8CD field set, The Lady From Chickasaw County, will be purchased right here.