Delta Momma Blues

Recorded at Century Sound on Fifty-Second Street, where Townes lived for three years in the early seventies, it was produced by Kevin Eggers and the pianist and string arranger Ron Frangipane, with Brooks Arthur engineering. Frangipane told John Kruth that Townes was a solo performer who trusted their reasoning but wanted to know where they were going. The album opens with FFV, a remake of the traditional Engine 143, and Brand New Companion shows the influence of Lightnin' Hopkins.

The title track was the first collaboration to appear on one of his albums, co-written with Cado Parish Studdard and Matthew Moore. Van Zandt said the lyric came from soldiers he met in Oklahoma who nicknamed a cough syrup Delta Mama. In 1995 he told Dutch television that Nothin' came right after he read The Last Temptation of Christ, and in 1970 he told WBAI that Rake followed his reading of Saint Francis, both by Nikos Kazantzakis. Ken Beckles took the cover photograph in the East Village.