BOBBIE GENTRY
1967
ODE TO BILLY JOE
BOBBIE GENTRY
from the 1967 Capitol LP
Ode To Billy Joe
ODE TO BILLY JOE
It was the third of June
Another sleepy, dusty delta day
I was out choppin' cotton
And my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped
And walked back to the house to eat
And mama hollered at the back door
Y'all remember to wipe your feet
And then she said
I got some news this morning
From Choctaw Ridge
Today Billy Joe McAllister
Jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
And papa said to mama
As he passed around the black-eyed peas
Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense
Pass the biscuits, please
There's five more acres in the lower forty
I got to plow
And mama said it was a shame
About Billy Joe anyhow
Seems like nothing ever comes to no good
Up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billy Joe McAllister's
Jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
And brother said he recollected
When he and Tom and Billy Joe
They put a frog down my back
At the Carroll County picture show
And wasn't I talkin' to him
After church last Sunday night
I'll have another piece of apple pie
You know it don't seem right
I saw him at the sawmill
Yesterday on Choctaw Ridge
And now you tell me Billy Joe's
Jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
And mama said to me
Child, what's happened to your appetite
I been cookin' all mornin'
And you haven't touched a single bite
That nice young preacher
Brother Taylor dropped by today
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday
Oh, by the way
He said he saw a girl
That looked a lot like you
Up on Choctaw Ridge
And she and Billy Joe was throwin' somethin'
Off the Tallahatchie Bridge
A year has come and gone
Since we heard the news 'bout Billy Joe
And brother married Becky Thompson
They bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus goin' round
Papa caught it and he died last spring
And now mama doesn't seem
To want to do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time
Pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water
Off the Tallahatchie Bridge
Words and music © 1967 Bobbie Gentry
Some songs appear to break every established rule of songwriting and go on to achieve classic status in spite of it. Ode to Billy Joe, title track of Bobbie's Gentry eponymous debut LP, reached #1 on the US Billboard chart in August 1967, won her three Grammy awards and has since been voted one of the 500 greatest songs of all time by the (predominantly male and white) readers of Rolling Stone magazine.
Yet the song itself, released more than half a century ago, remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle. Who exactly is Billy Joe McAllister? What is the precise nature of his relationship with the song's unnamed female narrator? What object did they throw off the bridge together before Billy Joe threw himself into the muddy waters of Mississippi's Tallahatchie River? None of these questions are answered yet ultimately the lack of definite information doesn't seem to matter. The song remains a masterpiece of allusion and understatement, an example of what I would describe as 'sonic cinema' which takes the listener on a compelling aural journey that possesses the cumulative power of a brilliantly conceived short story.
Gentry achieves this effect by continuously shifting the song's point-of-view. Its shared past tense narrative begins in the fields, then moves to the family kitchen, then shifts again to a memory of the past before ending in the present day. Yet none of this feels jarring to the listener because the accompaniment, like Gentry's voice, is deeply soulful, with orchestral backing used to emphasize certain key lines without ever becoming obtrusive or overly dramatic. The technique is almost entirely cinematic, jump cutting between incidents and images in a way that never compromises the song's appeal as a straightforward piece of storytelling. None of that is easy to do in a four minute pop song, requiring laser-like precision on the part of the writer and, of course, on the part of the vocalist performing it as well.
Ode to Billy Joe also has the distinction, shared by only a handful of popular songs, of serving as the basis for an entire motion picture. This film, directed by Max Baer Jr (who played the character of Jethro in The Beverly Hillbillies television series) and starring Robby Benson as Billy Joe and Glynnis O'Connor as his girlfriend Bobbie Lee Hartley, was released in 1976 and attempts to 'solve' the mystery of the song via a plot which shows the typically small town southern teenagers grappling with their first experiences of love and sex and, in the case of the title character, his unadmitted homosexuality. The script, stated in the credits as being penned by Herman Raucher, was allegedly co-written by Bobbie Gentry herself, with some of the scenes filmed on the farm owned by her grandparents in rural Mississippi where she grew up. It was made for the minuscule sum of $1 million and grossed $50 million at the US box office, a considerable achievement in itself given its setting and, for the time, its somewhat controversial subject matter.
Gentry is thought to have retained ten per cent of the film's profits for life in her deal with Warner Bros Studios, which may have helped to fund her disappearance from the music business — and from the public eye altogether — after her final live appearance in 1981 on the Bob Hope All Star Salute to Mother's Day television special. She's now rumored to be living in Los Angeles where she continues to ignore all requests for interviews and information about herself.
Use the link below to visit the UK-based Bobbie Gentry website which features a full biography of North American singer/songwriter BOBBIE GENTRY along with a news section, a full discography and a photo gallery:
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