On Sing the Delta‘s title track
“That song, I wrote at a time when my mom was kind of slipping away. She was 93 and becoming ill, and things weren’t looking good. That song, I think, just came out of a realization I had one day [of] the degree to which she had embodied a whole culture and passed that on to me. And that was that part of the country, the Arkansas Delta. … A lot of what I had stamped on me — musically, Sunday-dinner-wise, religion and everything else — was a direct outgrowth of that.”

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“The title cut from DeMent’s new album is a love song to the South, her drawl caressing the lyrics like a Stax Records piano-triplet groove.”

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Meredith Ochs of NPR’s All Things Considered reviews “Sing The Delta” – listen to the complete review online.

“The songs on “Sing the Delta” took a long time to make their way to Iris DeMent; she released her last album of original material 16 years ago. Her patience has rewarded us with a work of rare, unvarnished grace and power. “Sing the Delta” finds her, still, writing plainspoken, fiercely honest, deeply considered songs about matters of faith and questioning (“The Night I Learned How Not to Pray”), loss and remembering (“Before the Colors Fade”), simple beauty (“Mornin’ Glory”), and, especially, family and the ties family produces to place and the past (“Sing the Delta”). Those explorations are conveyed by a persistent gospel tenor and by her remarkable, thick twang, which quavers, thins, stretches, and soars in a manner that cuts to the emotional heart of the matter. In the album’s most explicitly autobiographical song, DeMent pays tribute to her mother: “When it came to her feelins there wasn’t a back burner on that stove,” she sings; “My mama was always tellin’ her truth.” On “Sing the Delta,” DeMent tells — sings, to our great fortune — her truth.

 

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Iris DeMent always sounded like she was from another century, but now she actually is. Her first three records appeared in relatively quick succession between 1992 and 1996, after which she fell mostly silent, releasing only “Lifeline,” a collection of hymns, in 2004. That record earned some notice thanks to the movies—her version of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” played over the closing credits of the Coen brothers’ remake of “True Grit.” Now she has returned with “Sing the Delta,” a strong collection of originals that find her keen eye for detail and distinctive high-lonesome wobble intact. As always, DeMent trains her gaze on family and faith, sometimes both at once (as in the chilling “The Night I Learned How Not To Pray”).

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