Song of the Day 6/3: Bobby Gentry, “Ode to Billy Joe”
On this date in fictional history, Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge, triggering one of pop music’s greatest mysteries: What did the narrator and Billie Joe throw off the bridge?
The question gripped America in the summer of 1967, when Gentry’s debut record knocked the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love” out of the No. 1 spot on the Hot 100, and it persisted for years, despite a 1976 TV movie, made with Gentry’s participation, that purported to tell what happened.
The record’s spare arrangement made it hard to classify, falling somewhere in a gray area bordered by blues, folk and country, and the prosaic story it told drew both disdain and comparisons to Faulkner. But people kept coming back to the mystery. By that winter, Gentry had grown exasperated at the public’s fascination with the missing detail at the expense of her actual intent.
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. … 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 record was taken from the demo tape that Gentry, looking for a contract, had sent to Capitol Records. They hired the great arranger Jimmie Haskell to score the strings, and though “Ode” was originally intended as a B-side, once company brass heard the result they elevated it to the A-side. The single was released less than three weeks after Gentry signed her contract.
Gentry had a successful recording career for 15 years — she was one of the first female artists to compose and produce her own material, and was a wildly popular Las Vegas draw in the ’70s — but in 1982, at age 40, she walked away from public life and has not given an interview since. Efforts to track her down have led to at least two different gated communities, one near Memphis, another in Los Angeles.
