Track Listing

1. A Long Road Ahead
2. My Baby Specializes
3. Things Get Better
4. We Can Love
5. All We Really Want To Do
6. It's Been A Long Time Coming
7. Just Plain Beautiful
8. Everybody Loves A Winner
9. Look What We Found
10. Piece Of My Heart
11. A Right Now Love
12. I've Just Been Feeling Bad
13. Dirty Old Man
14. Get Ourselves Together
15. Pour Your Love On Me
16. Hard To Say Goodbye

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25534 in Music
• Released on: 2006-07-13
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Extra tracks
• Dimensions: .21 pounds
• Running time: 47 minutes

CD Description
Recorded before Eric Clapton famously championed Delaney & Bonnie Bramlett (and vice versa), 1969's HOME (released on asubsidiary of the famed Stax label) finds the husband/wife duo belting out soul and blues tunes, backed by top-notch sidemen such as Isaac Hayes and Booker T. & the M.G.'s. While this debut is unfairly overshadowed by the couple's later, more high-profile outings, it features plenty of passionate, rough-edged gems, including "It's Been a Long Time Coming" and "A Right Now Love," that reveal why Delaney & Bonnie garnered such high-profile company. (Note: The 2006 reissue of HOME contains numerous bonus tracks.)

Customer Reviews

"Home" is where the heart is
Anyone who gives this album the once-through will be struck by the spirited delivery, sensuous atmosphere and Bonnie Bramlett's thrilling vocals. In fact, the record serves as a primer for what went on to be called "roots rock" and "blue-eyed soul" and represents the missing link in Eric Clapton's evolutionary tree. So, really, it's a rock masterpiece that ought to be in anyone's collection, right?

Not far wrong. Husband-and-wife team Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett released this, their debut, on the Stax label - then a struggling new imprint - in 1969. Bonnie already had the distinction of being Ike Turner's only white Ike-ette and her full-throated style bears the Tina Turner seal of approval; Delaney had a long pedigree as an in-demand session musician and songwriter: their first album should have gone stellar, especially when it was backed by Booker T & the MGs and the cream of Stax's soul/blues roster.

In fact, it performed only modestly at the time. Why? Hard to imagine, because this creamy confection of countrified soul just breathes effortless class - as well it might, considering who's on board. There was, one gathers, some prejudice at the time towards white musicians trying to appropriate black music. Certainly, their second offering took them in a more rock-orientated direction, a stylistic choice that landed them a supporting gig for Blind Faith, which is how Eric Clapton came to play on tour with them and their sound thoroughly infiltrates Clapton's '70s output. See? There's a lot of rock history condensed, sonnet-style, into this act.

I suspect the commercial indifference was more down to the album's feel-good, deep-in-love ethos, a statement of positive domestic bliss at odds with the increasingly embittered and politicised pop culture of '69 and '70. Take, for example, the album closer, Berns/Rogovoy's awesome "Piece of My Heart". Yes, it was Janis Joplin's version that got all the attention, but for me it's Bonnie who nails the song, in a slow-burning fashion, understated at first and building to an ecstatic climax without any of ol' Pearl's now rather dated histrionics.

Delaney can turn out a nice vocal flourish too, on Booker T's "Everybody Loves a Winner" (with the deathless chorus refrain "but when you lose - you lose alone!") and the romance and infectious sexual chemistry on "My Baby Specializes" and "It's Been a Long Time Coming" is simply irresistable.

I guess this wonderful album illustrates an important law in popular music, that the qualities that can make something a classic are the very features that can get it passed over on first release - its emotional authenticity, unadorned technical brilliance and a disdain for chasing "issues" through music. Think about Abbey Road, released the same year, where the Beatles went back to basics and won immortality, whereas who now listens to In the Court of the Crimson King or even Blind Faith?

There's a whole back catalogue to explore with Delaney & Bonnie and you could build a very respectable music collection of off-and-on the beaten track music from the late '60s and early '70s entirely by sourcing their bandmates and collaborators. But the place to start is "Home".