Sound Check Ode to “Ode to Billie Joe”
posted by on September 26 at 12:53 PM
Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 “Ode to Billie Joe” tells the story of a man who apparently commits suicide by jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Gentry’s delivery is stern and haunting. There are chills.I think it is one of the greatest songs ever written.
Sometimes people have strong associations to songs for no particular reason. This is one of those songs for me. Maybe it’s her voice, or the sound of it. Maybe it’s the string parts or the way the listener has to figure out what’s going on in the story. I don’t know. Gentry seems so isolated. It lingers.
In the song, Gentry sings as a narrator who is sitting down to a meal with her family. Her mom says there is news from Choctaw Ridge that, “Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge” and died. The family members exchange memories about Billie Joe, and Mama notices the narrator’s loss of appetite. Mama casually recounts her visit with a local preacher, Brother Taylor that morning. Brother Taylor saw Billie Joe and a girl who looked a lot like the narrator throwing something off of Tallahatchie Bridge not too long ago. A year passes. The narrator’s brother has married and moved away, her father has died and her mother is despondent. The narrator herself often visits the bridge to drop flowers off of it.
In 1975, Gentry said she hadn’t come up with a reason for Billie Joe’s suicide when she wrote the song. She has said in numerous interviews over the years that the song was not about the suicide itself. It was about the matter of fact way that the narrator’s family was discussing the tragedy over dinner, unaware that Billie Joe had been her boyfriend. A popular speculation at the release of the song in 1967 was that the narrator and Billie Joe threw their baby, either stillborn or aborted, off the bridge, and Billie Joe then killed himself out of grief and guilt.
Here is a live performance from the Smothers Brothers show:
i thought it was becasue he was gay.
Hey Terry!
in 1976, Warner Bros. got someone to adapt it into a novel and screenplay, Ode to Billy Joe. Notice different spelling.
It's in the novel and screenplay where Billy Joe is gay, and kills himself after a drunken homosexual experience, and the object thrown from the bridge is the narrator's ragdoll.
I'm scared of those people sitting at the table in the video. The thing I like about this song is the dialogue. It sounds just like a real conversation around a country dinner table.
It is an amazing song. T, had no idea you liked it too. I've wanted to cover it in some way for a long time, but it's one of those tunes that
would be hard/impossible to do justice to. It's so unique to bobbie gentry and her voice. maybe it's a southern thang.
Country music is amazing. Jerry Garcie was really a country and western band with love, life and heart break spilling out across the mic. Crossover American idol country is pop gone layered bad, but Billie Joe and and the bluegrass now folkgrass and catch Laura Love's newCD called Negrass....you can update the bridge tossing expereince as much as you want.....from the Banjo picking blue ridge,
Tante
Spine-tingling tune. Always has been. Always will be. Today's bands should think more about performing something that people will listen to forever, like OTBJ.
I've liked her LPs in general, three on Capitol, not sure how many more she did, better than her claim to fame OtBJ...they're not so country as well written late '60s pop.
Comments Closed
In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 14 days old).