Ode To Billie Joe (Bobbie Gentry)

Remember when we started doing this? Some days were dedicated to songs, rather than artists. Today is such a day; our subject is a song that was the artist's first solo single - and went all the way to #1 in the US in the summer of 1967, replacing the Beatles' All You Need Is Love and being replaced, after 4 weeks at the top, by The Box Tops' The Letter. In the yearly Billboard charts it was the third hit of 1967, after The Letter and Lulu's To Sir With Love. It also made #1 in Canada, #3 in New Zealand, and #13 in the UK.

Bobbie Gentry was born Roberta Lee Streeter on July 27, 1944 in Chickasaw County, Mississippi. In the few interviews that she gave, Gentry touched briefly on her rural upbringing, saying, “We didn’t have electricity, and I didn’t have many playthings.”

She did have music though. From the gospel sounds of the local Baptist church to old folk songs, Bobbie was fascinated. “My grandmother noticed how much I liked music, so she traded one of her milk cows for a neighbor’s piano,” Gentry said. Taking to the instrument immediately, she wrote her first song at age 7, a ditty called My Dog Sergeant is a Good Dog. After her parents divorced, 13-year-old Bobbie moved to Palm Springs, Calif. with her mother, who quickly remarried. With the family’s improved fortunes, Bobbie taught herself guitar, banjo, bass and vibes. As a teenager, she started playing gigs at a local country club, taking her stage name from Ruby Gentry, a movie about a poor, rural seductress.

After graduating high school, Bobbie, by then a raven-haired beauty, went to Vegas, where she worked in a Folies Bergere–style review, dancing and singing. In the mid-’60s, she moved to Los Angeles to attend UCLA, finally landing at the Conservatory of Music, where she studied composition and arranging. A demo tape she made ended up on the desk of Capitol Records A&R man Kelly Gordon.

Ode To Billie Joe was recorded in mid 1967 at Studio C in the Capitol tower. Accompanying herself on guitar, Bobbie nailed a keeper take in 40 minutes. Arranger Jimmie Haskell told MOJO, “I asked Kelly, ‘What do you want me to do?’ He said, ‘Just put some strings on it so we won’t be embarrassed. No one will ever hear it anyway.’ The song sounded to me like a movie—those wonderful lyrics. I had a small group of strings—two cellos and four violins to fit her guitar-playing. I was branching out in my own head for the first time, creating something that I liked because we thought no one was ever gonna hear it.”

The finished version of Ode was over seven minutes long. Capitol edited it down to a more manageable four minutes and stuck it on the flip side of Mississippi Delta. But those were the days when DJs still had minds of their own, and as in the stories of so many classic hits, the B-side became the A-side.

It sounded like nothing else on the radio, Gentry’s husky voice inviting listeners into a world that was as dark and exotic as a Flannery O’Connor story. Not long after the song’s debut, the water cooler talk started. This talk had to do with unanswered questions in the lyrics. For those of you out of the loop, here are the lyrics:

"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 out the back door, y'all, remember to wipe your feet

And then she said, I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge

Today, Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And papa said to mama, as he passed around the blackeyed peas

Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits, please

There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow

And mama said it was shame about Billy Joe, anyhow

Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge

And now Billie Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And brother said he recollected when he, and Tom, and Billie Joe

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-a apple pie; you know, it don't seem right

I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge

And now ya tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And mama said to me, child, what's happened to your appetite?

I've been cookin' all morning, 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 Billie Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge

A year has come and gone since we heard the news 'bout Billie Joe

And brother married Becky Thompson; they bought a store in Tupelo

There was a virus going '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"

As Gentry told Fred Bronson, “The song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty. But everybody seems more concerned with what was thrown off the bridge than they are with the thoughtlessness of the people expressed in the song. What was thrown off the bridge really isn’t that important.

“Everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge—flowers, a ring, even a baby. Anyone who hears the song can think what they want, but the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. They sit there eating their peas and apple pie and talking, without even realizing that Billie Joe’s girlfriend is sitting at the table, a member of the family.”

The song won Gentry three Grammy Awards, including Best New Artist (she was the first Country artist to ever win in this category).

The enigma of her best-known song is nothing compared to that of Bobbie Gentry herself. In the early ’70s, she was riding high—headlining in Vegas, duetting with Glen Campbell on several hits, hosting her own TV series. Then around 1975, after contributing music to a movie based on Ode To Billie Joe, she simply checked out. She has not been heard from in over 35 years. All requests for interviews, recordings and performances have been denied. She is said to be living in the Los Angeles area.

Only a few of these story songs ever inspired dramatization, like The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia and Harper Valley P.T.A. Ode To Billie Joe eventually found its way to a 1976 movie, directed by Max Baer, best known as Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies. The movie promised that “what the song didn’t tell you, the movie will show you,” but it took a surprisingly different turn (and changed the spelling of Billie’s name to Billy). When screenwriter Herman Raucher met with Gentry to find out why Billie Joe committed suicide, she admitted she didn’t know at all. So the movie recast Billy Joe as a gay teenager in 1960 Mississippi. Although he believes himself to be in love with Bobbie Lee (the character name a nod to the composer of the song), after he gets drunk at a party one night, he has sex with a man. Robby Benson, king of 1970s teen issue movies like Jeremy and The Death Of Richie, knew how to effectively convey Billy Joe’s anguish, alongside his frequent co-star Glynnis O’Connor, who is our apparent narrator. He rages in despair over what he considers an unnatural act, leading to his suicidal jump. At the end of the movie, Bobbie Lee throws flowers off the bridge for Billy Joe, just like in the song.

This is the movie's official trailer:

This is the coming out scene:

If you want to know whatever happened to Robby Benson (photo), watch this: