Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billie Joe by Murtha Tara

Author:Murtha, Tara
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Gentry’s delivery is steady, almost stoic. The mood is dark. By the time Mama tells us she got some news this morning from Choctaw Ridge, we know it isn’t any good. As Gentry gets closer to the awful truth, her voice deepens, constricting around the vowels like a snake coiled on a tree branch. And then we learn what happened: “Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge.”

“She knows why Billie Joe went to his death,” wrote Marcus. “She knows what they threw into the black water, but not only will she not tell, no one around the table even thinks to ask.”9

Greil Marcus wrote that he got so caught up in trying to follow the song’s “sliding phrases,” he smashed into the car in front of him.

The song was inescapable in the summer of 1967, and so was the debate about what the narrator threw off the bridge.10 Listeners believed solving the small, concrete mystery would lead to solving the bigger, existential one. Some people guessed it was a ring. Others—like David Axelrod and the former Vice President of Capitol Records—were convinced it was a baby or a fetus, and that the girl had a miscarriage or an abortion. Still others thought that it was a comment on racial relations. After all, it was the waters of the Tallahatchie River that, for three days in the summer of 1955, held the lifeless body of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy kidnapped, beaten, and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Gentry repeatedly said that focusing on what was thrown off the bridge missed the point. When inevitably asked during interviews, Gentry would say the song was about indifference, about the fact “that this boy’s death did not get his neighbors involved [and] that unless you are very close to someone, tragedy doesn’t involve you.” But she wasn’t even protesting indifference, she said, just describing it. “I’m not so sure indifference isn’t a good thing,” she said in 1967. “If we were all totally affected by tragedy we’d be afraid to go anywhere or do anything.”11 Gentry said the mystery object thrown off the bridge was just a literary device she used to establish motivation. “You have to establish some motivation,” she said. “What happened the day before on the bridge was the motivation, but I left it open so the listener could draw his own conclusion.”12

Capitol expected “Ode to Billie Joe” to be a hit—but not that big a hit. Thanks to those mysterious lyrics, that “special quiet,” and Gentry’s sexy, husky voice, “Ode to Billie Joe” was what former Capitol Records President Don Zimmerman calls a “magic” record.

In the summer of 1967, Zimmerman was working as a field marketing man for Capitol. “Capitol came up with an idea of taking regions that were spread out, and covering them with a sales and promotion person,” Zimmerman, 79, told me on the phone from his home in California. “Back in the early days of rock and roll and R&B, the majors weren’t really into it.

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