More from “British guitarist”: analysis of Bobby Gentry singing “Ode to Billy Joe”
[NOTE: For much-needed relief from politics and riots.]
I remember the song well; it was a big hit in 1967, that seminal 60s year. But it was hardly typical of the times. It was a quiet song that told a story, a mysterious one at that. I recall rather liking it at the time for its catchy tune and intriguing lyrics, but it was far from a big favorite of mine.
The affable, amiable, and deeply knowledgeable “British guitarist” has a lot to say about it, though, which has deepened my appreciation of the subtle poetry of the lyrics and Gentry’s understated delivery, which is perfect.
Did you notice that lyric towards the end: “There was a virus going ’round; Papa caught it…”?
“Ode to Billy Joe” was typical of the times in that amazing music was coming from everywhere and making it to the radio stations everyone listened to.
The bestselling song of 1967 was “To Sir with Love” — a quiet song which told a story, albeit not all that mysterious.
“Ode to Billy Joe” was the third-ranked bestseller in 1967.
The seventh besteller was the Frank Sinatra/Nancy Sinatra duet, “Something Stupid.”
The tenth bestseller was the Frankie Valli ballad, “Can’t Take My Eyes off of You.”
The only real countercultural song in that top ten was the Doors’ “Light My Fire.”
Times are tough when a song about poor Billie Joe McAllister’s suicide provides relief.
Bobbie Gentry is a music industry mystery story in her own right. This song was her career high point and she had a few lesser hits and then somewhere in the late 1970s she packed it all in and has not been heard of much since. Apparently she is still alive and in her late seventies but not at all in the public eye.
Griffin: Bobbie Gentry is indeed a mystery of her own.
Hats off.
some of the ballad songs of the 50’s and 60’s were kind of cheesy like “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley” by the The Kingston Trio, early on Tennessee Ernie Ford with “16 Tons” and later Dolly Parton and some of her songs which were ballads. “Ode to Billy Joe” was great and the setting at a dinner table in the South with every person at the table talking about themselves was a wonderful normal setting for a tragic ballad.
Even the damn Hill Billy Country Western music that I grew up with and I did not care to much for has been screwed up with all of the extra studio work on the music and voices, I have no idea what a good song produced in the past ten years is, in my opinion they have taken music which used to be fine cuts of meat from different sources and ground it all up and made wieners out of it, except for rap which was crap out of the box.
I was only seven when this song came out but it stuck with me. I still listen to it now and again and it reminds me of my childhood. My kids never liked it much.
When Covid got hot, I included the “Billy Joe” quote, neo alludes to, in emails to various friends.
_______________________________
There was a virus goin’ around
Papa caught it an’ he died last spring
And now Mama doesn’t seem
To wanna do much of anything
–Bobbie Gentry, “Ode to Billy Joe”
_______________________________
The song is a master class in understatement.
The song enjoyed a revival in 1976 when the film came out, heard on top 40 stations as well as on adult contemporary stations. Herman Raucher then worked the screenplay into a novel. Not a bad novel, btw.
IIRC, Bobby Gentry has never offered a solution for the puzzles in the lyrics. Herman Raucher offered one out of his own imagination (a solution of the sort you might have expected from a work published in 1995, not 1976).
yup. Been humming that song for weeks now, because of the virus line
Loved the song but was distracted by the narrator’s left eye. He has a weak medical rectus muscle. I’;m always seeing these things on people. Sorry.
For me, the song somehow makes me feel the intense, boring heat of a Mississippi summer day.
I think Ode to Billy Joe is a masterpiece. Liked it then, still like it now.
This is a great song. As far as I know Bobby Gentry never had another success. I also recommend the versions by Tammy Wynette and Ray Charles.
She did write and record ‘Fancy’ a song about a mother who basically pimps her daughter out to a rich man. It was a minor pop hit and top ten country hit in 1969 but became more famous when Reba McEntire covered it in the early 90s and it became one of her best known hits.
Do they really chop cotton and bale hay in the same season down there? Seems like two different seasons to me.
But I liked the song the first time I heard it and every time since. For the understatement, I think. Certainly not for the musical complexity. (I was listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony yesterday — you want musical complexity?)
My wife and I were living in India when this came out. I don’t think it ever made it there, but we came home that year and headed for Laos 18 months later, so we would have heard it then.
Well, I grew up on a farm in northern Appalachia and was 25 when that song came out. It came to me from the opposite pole of many things – but spoke directly to my own emotional experience of ruin from the deep South and the female experience of unbearable loss. Stuff of the soul straight out of the darkness.
Agree with Parker, Ode to Billie Joe is a masterpiece. Hear it and you can’t stop wondering about those people’s lives, past, present and future.
I love the narrative song tradition when it’s done well. Less is more seems to be the key. A few other favorites of mine are “Charlie Freak” by Steely Dan and “Stagger Lee”. Can’t remember the artist at the moment but I’ll never forget the first lines.
“I was standin’ on the corner, when I heard my bulldog bark,
He was barkin’ at the two men who was gamblin’ in the dark”.
And, boom, you’re there.
Tyler Coe’s “Cocaine and Rhinestones” podcast gets deep into the weeds on things, and does an episode on Bobbie Gentry you might like. I’m not a fan of Coe’s speaking voice, so instead of listening to the podcast I like to read the transcripts. Might be interesting if you want to go down the rabbit hole a bit.
https://cocaineandrhinestones.com/bobbie-gentry-exit-stage-left
That Tyler Coe podcast is great, actually I read the transcript. I was somewhat annoyed by the beginning when he is just pontificating about fame and celebrity in general but as soon as he starts talking about Gentry it gets good. Very illuminating not only about Gentry but of many aspects of the music/entertainment business and all of it fascinating. I may listen to the podcast now that I know it has a number of song excerpts. Hopefully will be able to tolerate his voice.
Molly Brown…”Stagger Lee” was apparently based on a real murder that occurred circa 1895. I linked a couple of versions of it at my post Crimesongs:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/57218.html
Certainly not for the musical complexity.
Complexity per se does not improve a work of art (though it may display skill in producing that work of art).
There was a movie made based on “Ode to Billy Joe,” Roger Ebert thought it was actually pretty good:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/ode-to-billy-joe-1976
Neo,You have such a broad range of intellectual pursuits. Thank you
This British guitarist’s smile is captivating.
I was only seven but I remember it well. One of the all-time greats. I can also remember all the speculation about what they threw off the bridge. But the best thing about the song is the account of the dinner conversation, even with the little interjections like “Pass the biscuits, please.” The song just puts you right there at the table, with a family that, like many, doesn’t quite say everything they’re thinking. It is surprising she was kind of a one-hit wonder, though that wasn’t unusual.
I have an earworm stuck up in my head thanks to you’all,
“Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”
keeps going round and round, woke me up in the night.
A great song, and great storytelling as well. We get just enough background to imagine the setting, an ordinary and believable conversation… and a mystery which can never really be solved. It’s a great example of “show, don’t tell”.
Thanks Chap, for link to great discussion and background-I read the transcript, podcasts are too slow for me.
When I YouTubed the song with lyrics, I heard the studio hit version.
This was a live version. An even more expressive live version is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz3SVL3DB6E
A normal dinner conversation with the (sort of secret?) girlfriend of a guy who just jumped off a bridge. Presumably died, rather than walking away, tho it’s only implied with the “It’s been a year since we heard the news about Billy Joe”.
Maybe the story is why Fil seems to be smiling a bit less here than usual – but I got tired of his too-big smile on some other videos.
“Unconscious cruelty” is the subtext of the song. The banal “pass the biscuits” along with dismissal of the dead boyfriend. I would have called it “Oblivious lack of caring”.
Mysterious. So much unspoken. The meaning of Great Art is so often heavily based on what the audience brings to it. What was thrown off the bridge?
I thought “the McGuffin” was a premature self-aborted fetus, and the reason for his jumping, but knew I didn’t know.
(Such feelings and beliefs can be called prior probabilities … talked about on Arnold Kling’s AskBlog recently: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/ )
Arnold’s a quite different blogger, yet similarly honest about himself. GREAT list of “what I got right and wrong on COVID” (more public folk should do this):
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/a-virus-crisis-diary-part-1/
Musically, it was so nice to hear Stagger Lee by Lloyd Price, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfG1lBS_1aw
Tho I learned the sorry story of Stagger Lee and Billy thru a ska-ish tune:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er0GyqRI6sw
(Don’t you know it is wrong?)
Finally, in this pandemic,
I’ve got some groceries, some peanut butter (to last a couple of days.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jShMQw2H2cM&list=RDWPOTgzqErd4&index=5
Tom,
Thanks for that. It’s been a long time since I looked at Arnold Kling’s blog.
c.
Great analysis by the Brit, though he took a while to get going.
I remember the song coming out, and some “pure” C&W people grumbling that only a pretty woman could get a way with talking about black-eyed peas and choppin’ cotton, but I could tell even as a young teenager there was a lot of jealousy in their complaint. I did not like country music at all in 1967, being an elitist New England folkie (I mean, those Southern people were all known to be uneducated racists, so listening to their music would just encourage that, y’know?), but the song haunted me in spite of that. New Hampshire actually did have a C&W tradition I only gradually became aware of in later high school, before heading to college in Virginia, where I learned even more! A fellow coffee house performer was very big on Gentry, so I bought the album. I didn’t like much of it, but I still remember lots of it, so I suppose that says something in itself.
When the movie came out I was appalled, because they took the reason for suicide out from the intentionally vague – so that the listener could participate in the artistic experience by trying various possibilities on – to a very Hollywood message of bemoaning how hard it was to be gay.
Jimmy, I urge you again to listen to or read the transcript of the podcast cited above by Chap. I have not yet listened to Gentry’s other work but it makes it clear that while she may have been a “one-hit wonder” she was not a fluke.
AVI, I also grew up in New England around the same time but there was a fair amount of country music on the radio hiding as “pop” or “rock”. Later on I began to appreciate more hard-core “classic” country music from Hank Williams, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn etc.
Country music has always been a great medium for storytelling. Here is a rather stark story from Dolly Parton’s mentor Porter Wagoner, “The Cold Hard Facts of Life”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-aEiNzHxGI
He needs a proper haircut.
Such an emotive song. I first heard it when I was 7 and it made me cry; still does. I saw the movie later as a teen-ager. It didn’t do the song justice-and honestly, I didn’t buy then nor do I now the reason the movie gave why Billy Joe jumped off the bridge. Thank you for including this. It prompted me to read about Bobby Gentry. I’m always surprised (although I shouldn’t be) how many of these folk or R&R singers have significant training and virtuosity; they didn’t just happen.
Puts me in mind of “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” another summertime hit taking place in the rural south. Both songs were played endlessly on AM radio.
FOAF, I did read it. Agree that “one-hit wonder” is a disservice to her. Multi-talented, driven, ambitious, but obviously something must have snapped to make her “disappear” at age 40. Kind of sad, though maybe she’s happy. I’m sure three brief failed marriages didn’t help.
My take is that she didn’t quite “snap” but it was coming all along. There is a lot of BS in the music business and she apparently wasn’t the type to put up with it willingly. Plus she seems to have been financially shrewd unlike many artists/musicians who hit the jackpot and then fritter it away. One thing that caught my eye was that she was an early investor in the Phoenix Suns. With the way the value of sports franchises has skyrocketed that alone assured her financial independence. So when she acquired enough FU money she said FU. The thing that is strange is how she has completely cut herself off. Maybe she is not a “people person”. I can relate.
Many thanks to Chap and Tom Grey for chasing those links down. Fascinating.
I got the song so wrong, that I thought that “Billy Joe” was “Billie Joe(sephine)” or something. Well, A.M.was radio in a car my parents were driving … and all that
Assumed that the female singer of the song, with her blase morally indifferent tone, had helped a female friend to dispose of a newborn, and that the birth mother, feeling guilty, later killed herself.
Re chopping cotton. 1967, was only 20 years or so past the day when small farmers in the south did hand work in their own fields.
Although Gentry appears not to have been the naive and untutored girl the truncated story of her demo tape seemed to indicate (I thought she taped a demo single on a home recorder in her living room or something), a laconically felt connection to field work would have been perfectly natural in the south and in much or rural America at that date. It would have been something your parents and grandparents conversed about naturally, and something that was just then fading away, but lived in daily memory.
I’m so glad you found this guy and shared these videos with us. I watched this yesterday along with the one on Frankie Valli and then I watched a few more. He does Patsy Cline singing Crazy and talks for a LONG time about vocal chords. There’s also an analysis of Janis Joplin singing Ball and Chain at Monterey Pop.
I love hearing people speak about what they know and love, plus I’m interested in music but don’t know a thing so there’s lots to learn here. To add to the enjoyment, I like many of these songs. It is fascinating to learn about some of the technical reasons for my emotional response to a song like Crazy. (The analysis includes the point that a certain sound is similar to a baby’s cry and so gets a visceral response.) Fil has a delightful presence and it’s so heartwarming to watch his enthusiasm for each performer’s gift.
I love this song, it is considered a `country’ song but it really isn’t is it? And Bobbie Gentry is more than just `Billie Joe’, too…
I remember her singing it on The Smothers Brothers show, and I remember how attractive I thought she was. Then, later in the show, she sang “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”–while wearing one. Yowza! It’s interesting that in my memory she was almost naked, and my mother expressed disapproval; but I saw a clip of this on YouTube about a year ago, and the bikini she wore was more modest (if there is such a thing as a “modest bikini”) than I remembered. I guess in the ensuing decades I got “spoiled” by string bikinis and microkinis.
The storytelling song of farm life in the South in the 60s reminds of this one that I think is the greatest love song ever. Not romantic love. The real, nitty gritty love that is the only kind that really matters. Get your tissues ready. Clarence Carter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaKP_jKz6YA