Everyone who has a more than deep interest in Afro-American music like Blues, Jazz or Soul will know the origins of this music and how it derived from the cotton fields in the Southern USA and especially in the Delta regions of the Mississippi. And if you're from Jackson, Mississippi, - like Cassandra Wilson - recording an album in an old train station in Clarksdale, that has been transformed for two days into a recording studio, it's more like coming home than exploring your roots.
Musicwise it's no real surprise what we get from Cassandra except that she's even more down-to-earth on Belly Of The Sun. It's the usual instrumentation of acoustic, resonator guitars, drums or percussion, though there's only one song that features a piano (the great Darkness On The Delta that's Cassandra and Boogaloo Ames - who's something of a local hero with his 80+ years in the Delta - on piano only).
And since India.Arie listed Cassandra as one of her influences and Cassandra wrote Just Another Parade to record it with another singer we get a duet of both singers here. And what a fine song it is (and it wouldn't have been out of place on India.Arie's album too)! Although it was recorded in a New Yorker Studio (like Cassandra's cover of Bob Dylan's Shelter From The Storm and Waters Of March) and not on the Clarksdale's train station it fits perfectly to the rest more downtempo and deep songs here. Only on Only A Dream In Rio (with its slight latin feel which also features a 12-string banjo as instrumentation) and Hot Tamales the tempo is a litle faster.
If it will get much warmer now I can grow my own cotton here in Europe, put some black shoe polish onto my face, get my own minstrel show and put Belly Of The Sun on continuous repeat into the CD player and sing along to. Ok, that's the more romantic part one can imagine but I really don't want to change today's life for the past regarding all the injustice, racism and suppression that happened then.