Delta Momma Blues
| Delta Momma Blues | ||||
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| Studio album by Townes Van Zandt | ||||
| Released | 1971 | |||
| Recorded | 1970, Century Sound Studios, New York, N.Y. |
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| Genre | Country blues | |||
| Length | 32:55 | |||
| Label | Tomato | |||
| Producer | Kevin Eggers, Ronald Frangipane | |||
| Townes Van Zandt chronology | ||||
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| Allmusic |   |
Delta Momma Blues is the fourth album by country singer/songwriter Townes Van Zandt, released in 1971. Unlike his previous albums, which were influenced by Appalachian folk and country music and recorded in Nashville, this album was blues influenced and recorded in New York City.
Delta Momma Blues was recorded at Century Sound of Fifty-second Street in New York, where Van Zandt lived for three years in the early seventies. It was produced by Van Zandt's manager Kevin Eggers and Ron Frangipane, a pianist and string arranger who had studied under Igor Stravinsky and had previously worked with the Monkees, Dusty Springfield, John Lennon and Rolling Stones. "Townes was not involved in the recording process in the traditional sense," Frangipane explained to John Kruth in 2007. "Whereas someone like Janis Ian would micromanage every eighth note, Townes was more like, sitting back in an old easy chair with holes in it, playing his guitar on the day before the session, saying, 'Well, what are we gonna do?' He trusted that our reasoning was probably better than his, but he wanted to know where we were going. He was not just an 'I'll show up, play it, and go home' guy...He was very much a solo performer." Frangipane and engineer Brooks Arthur largely abandon the superfluous adornment that accompanied Van Zandt's first three albums, with the producer telling Kruth, "If I saw anything I could have done to get at least one crossover hit with Townes, I would have done it. But I never read him that way. Townes was essentially an American storyteller, like a guy sitting on a porch, talking to you."
Delta Mama Blues includes some of Van Zandt's most heralded compositions, including the menacing "Rake" and the cautionary "Nothin'". Although many listeners assume that "Nothin'" is about drug addiction, Van Zandt explained in a 1995 Dutch television interview that he wrote it immediately after reading The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis. In October 1970, Van Zandt told WBAI DJ Ron Fass that he had written "Rake" in Wilmington, Delaware, after reading another novel by Kazantzakis, Saint Francis. "For me, 'Rake' is unforgettable," producer Frangipane marvels in the 2007 book To Live's To Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt. "When we finally nailed it, we knew it was the special moment on the album." Although these songs are particularly dark, the album does include several tender ballads rich with Van Zandt's poetic imagery, such as "Come Tomorrow" and "Tower Song". Reminiscing about the sorrowful "Tower Song" in the notes to the 1977 songbook For the Sake of the Song, the singer confesses, "I thought when I wrote 'Tower Song' that I was writing to someone else. Now I'm not sure that I wasn't writing it to me."
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