Consumer Guide Album

Delaney & Bonnie: The Best of Delaney & Bonnie [Rhino, 1990]
Bonnie was the songwriter and the terrific singer, Delaney the bandleader and the real good singer. Theirs was a marriage made on Sunset Strip, where two Southerners' displaced rural conservatism met the counterculture's exaltation of earthtone authenticity in an image of hippie adulthood that lasted till the divorce was underway in 1972 (shortly after they agreed to dispense with Bonnie's live-in lover on the unbelievably tender "Move 'Em Out"). Their conjugal sturm-und-drang was "a natural fact," the most canny and heartfelt and effortless rock-soul fusion in history. Their solo careers were a depressing embarrassment. A