Reviews

Artist:Grey DeLisle
Album: Driftless Girls
Label: Hummin' Bird
Tracks: 11
Website: https://www.greydelislegriffin.com/

Following swiftly on the heels of 2022's covers album Borrowed, her duo album as Roughouses and last year's old school country She's An Angel, her first of original material, this finds her in the company of Buck Meek, Nikki Grossman, Adam Brisbin, Gil Landry and, making her debut as producer, Jolie Holland.

All bar three are self-penned, Holland and Meek the co-writers on the album's spare ballad love song opener 'Where You're Coming From' ("Your voice came ringing and it shot right through me/Now I know you like I think I know myself/Just a big mystery like everybody else …I can say anything and you don't judge me"), hitting the twang and organ for a slowed down lope and lyrically reworked take on 'My Two Feet' written by ex-husband Murray Hammond from The Old 97s and originally featured on their 2008 album Blame It On Gravity.

The self-penned title track follows, spinning the protagonist's story ("Born on wildcat mountain and raised on Turkey Ridge/She lost her heart to an Amish boy beneath a covered bridge/Her daddy raised tobacco near the Vernon County line/Her mama hung their warshin' in the West Prairie sunshine… She moved down to Coon Valley as a Gays Mills divorcée/Before the river climbed the banks and washed her home away") to the sound of piano and fiddle with backing vocals from Grossman whose band gets a nod in the line "She plays Sapsuckers records so much louder than she should".

Dolly Parton's a regular reference point, and that's certainly the case in the backwoods swing and gospel of 'Little Ol' While', a playful handclap rhythm song about the coming together of driftless souls ("I'm a little lost girl/Who can't be saved/Too set in all my ramblin' ways/You're a little lost boy/Who cannot smile/Let's get lost together for a little old while") and their "little lost dog", a celebration of living a life with no collar or chain, featuring a piano and jazzy guitar bridge.

Another storysong, featuring Holland on backing vocals and Keith Cary on mandolin, the Appalachian-flavoured 'The Ballad of Ella Mae' tells of "a little gal in Willow Springs" who "married her a wicked man" and spent "near on 15 years of being slandered and abused" before "one evening while she tended to her weeping swollen eye" she beat him with "the ivory clarinet he would not let her play" and "pressed his horsehair fiddle bow/Across his throat with all her might until his face turned blue then brought her lips against his ear and whispered 'Shame on You'"), before burying him the backyard and dumping his car in the Mojave River.

Things go old time for the end of a relationship pedal steel weepie 'I Don't Wanna Want You' ("I don't wanna want you no more/If you don't want me/I don't wanna break down your door/I want the key/I don't wanna look up to you/From down on my knees…Let me be your baby/Or just let me be"), while, with brushed snares. keys and a laid back guitar solo, the easy rolling chugger 'Pretty Jolie' offsets "been told some things that tossed and turned my head around/Been pulled over/Been pulled aside…been a lady lost at sea and pulled in with the tide" with the uplift of how being "out on the road/With my pretty Jolie/There ain't no one stopping me".

There's a rockier edge to the organ-sprinkled walking beat relationship metaphor bullets of 'Quick Draw' ("You're a quick draw darling/Ain't sure who shot who…Make me scream and shout/When we're locked and loaded/Ain't a single doubt/You're a Sure Shot baby/Damn I'm glad you took me out"), rolling into the more soulful and bluesier honky tonk of 'In The Living Room', a snapshot of domestic contentment ("I wanna hold you in the living room/Swaying slowly to a fiddle tune/With our babies fast asleep/With no shoes on our feet/I wanna hear you say your name with mine/And always be your Valentine") with crooning steel and piano.

The last of the originals returns to storytelling with Holland duetting and Landry stepping up for 'Mama's Little Rose', a tragic tale of incest, ostracisation, self-administered abortion ("She was only 21 with three young mouths to feed/and just before our daddy died he planted a seed/The preacher in his fancy Sunday go to meetin' clothes made her feel the thorny sting of mama's little rose… Not a soul to cling to and her back against the wall/She pulled a knitting needle from a woolen crimson ball") and maternal love ("Mama won a jewelry box/At last year's county fair/There she kept our baby teeth and golden locks of hair/At sunrise it went missing/Where only heaven knows/Just the perfect size to cradle mama's little rose") death and legacy ("just before she died our mama planted a seed/She swirls all around us when the Wild West wind blows…..scattering the petals of our Mama's little rose").

It sounds just like a vintage Dolly Parton song, so it seems fitting that it also ends with one and DeLisle's marching beat warbling rework of her teenage pregnancy and shame ballad 'Down From Dover', a splendid send off to a terrific album and, it transpires, a prelude to three further projects to be produced, respectively, by Andy Paley, Marvin Etzioni and John Carter Cash. Prior to her 2022 comeback, she'd not released anything for 17 years; she's clearly making up for lost time. For which we should all be grateful.

Mike Davies

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