I have to admit that until very recently I had not heard of Iris Dement. But when I saw the cover of her new CD I had to hear what she had to say in her new book of songs. Just by looking at her I was positive that this was a singer with deep roots in Arkansas and would surely deliver a soulful combination of gospel, blues, folk and country.  I was not disappointed.

DeMent’s new album, her fifth, is her first in eight years. All the songs on Sing the Delta are written by DeMent and she explores varying kinds of loss as she captures her times spent in “tiny, over-crowded bars, half-empty theatres, libraries, churches, museums, parks, parking lots and tents…you name it.” Her mother used to ask her: “Ain’t you got tard yet of trapesin all over the country?”

Dement was born in the Arkansas Delta, and although she moved to California as a child, the influence of the region is vividly recalled both in her voice and in her own words. She says it’s where “my people on both sides going back eked out a livin’ farmin’ and fillin’ cotton sacks.”

DeMent explains that she comes from a musical family and says she got from her religious parents that “music was something to lean on.” The songs about her early childhood in Arkansas – where she would sometimes attend a Pentecostal church seven days a week – are tales of love and pained stories of death and faith questioned.

You’ll be both captivated and soothed by The Night I Learned How Not to Pray, Go On Ahead and Go Home (which brings touches of Loretta Lyn to memory) and the wonderful Before The Colours Fade and Sing the Delta.

As DeMent plays the piano she lifts her drawling voice and delivers the memories of the Arkansas Delta.

John Prine, one of her early advocates, said, “Iris’s songs talk about isolated memories of life, love and living.”

by Pamela Hulse Andrews