Ode to Billie Joe
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| "Ode to Billie Joe" | |||||||||
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| Single by Bobbie Gentry | |||||||||
| from the album Ode to Billie Joe | |||||||||
| B-side | "Mississippi Delta" | ||||||||
| Released | July 1967 | ||||||||
| Format | 7", 45rpm | ||||||||
| Genre | Country, Blues | ||||||||
| Length | 4:15 | ||||||||
| Label | Capitol 5950 | ||||||||
| Writer(s) | Bobbie Gentry | ||||||||
| Producer | Kelly Gordon | ||||||||
| Bobbie Gentry singles chronology | |||||||||
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"Ode to Billie Joe" is a 1967 song written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry, a singer-songwriter from Chickasaw County, Mississippi. The single, released in late July, was a number-one hit in the United States, and became a big international seller. The song is ranked #412 on Rolling Stone's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The recording of "Ode to Billie Joe" generated eight Grammy nominations, including three wins for Gentry and one win for arranger Jimmie Haskell.[1]
Contents |
[edit] Story
This song is a first person narrative that reveals a quasi-Southern Gothic tale in its verses by including the dialog of the narrator's family at dinnertime on the day that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge." Throughout the song, the suicide and other tragedies are contrasted against the banality of everyday routine and polite conversation.
The song begins with the narrator and her brother returning, after morning chores, to the family house for dinner. After cautioning them about tracking in dirt, "Mama" says that she "got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge" that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge," apparently to his death.
At the dinner table, the narrator's father is unsurprised at the news and says, "Well, Billie Joe never had a lick o' sense; pass the biscuits, please" and mentions that there are "five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow." Although her brother seems to be taken aback ("I saw him at the sawmill yesterday.... And now you tell me Billie Joe has jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"), he's not shocked enough to keep him from having a second piece of pie. Late in the song, Mama questions the narrator's complete loss of appetite ("Child, what's happened to your appetite? I been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched a single bite,") yet earlier in the song recalled a visit earlier that morning by Brother Taylor, the local preacher, who mentioned that he had seen Billie Joe and a girl who looked very much like the narrator herself and they were "throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge."
In the song's final verse, a year has passed, during which the narrator's brother has married and moved away. Also, her father died from a viral infection, which has left her mother despondent. The narrator herself now visits Choctaw Ridge often, picking flowers there to drop from the Tallahatchie Bridge onto the murky waters flowing beneath.
The bridge mentioned in this song collapsed in June 1972.[2]
In an interview with Bob Harris broadcast by BBC Radio 2 in Bob Harris Country on 16 April 2009, singer Rachel Harrington claimed that Bobbie Gentry originally wrote 11 verses but deleted six because a record producer thought it was too long.
[edit] Recording
"Ode to Billy Joe" was originally intended as the "B side" of Gentry's first single recording, a blues number called "Mississippi Delta," on Capitol Records. It was originally a seven minute recording with only Gentry's guitar backing the lyrics which told more of the story of what happened to Billie Joe at the Tallahatchie Bridge. After the original version was finished, the label executives realized that this song was the better option for a single release. Thus, they went back into the studio with the string orchestra for backing and cut the song length almost in half. Cutting the length and lyrics provided the song with a mystical allure which left more to the listener's imagination about what really happened to Billie Joe. It also made it more suitable for radio airplay.[3]
[edit] Speculation
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This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (May 2009) |
The mysteries surrounding the characters in the song created something of a cultural sensation at the time and at least one urban legend. In 1975, Gentry told author Herman Raucher that she hadn't come up with a reason for Billie Joe's suicide when she wrote the song. She has stated in numerous interviews over the years that the focus of the song was not the suicide itself, but the rather matter-of-fact way that the narrator's family was discussing the tragedy over dinner, unaware that Billie Joe might well have been her boyfriend.
A popular speculation at the release of the song in 1967 (unsupported by either the song's lyrics or the culture of that area and time period) was that the narrator and Billie Joe threw their baby (live, stillborn or aborted) off the bridge, and Billie Joe then killed himself out of grief and guilt. This version of events is accentuated in the Sinéad O'Connor version, where a baby is heard to cry at the moment the mystery item is thrown off the bridge. There was also speculation that Billie Joe was black, having a forbidden affair with the white narrator, although the culture of that area, in that time period, made it extremely unlikely that a black man would have had any part in the events described in the song's lyrics (a frog down the narrator's back at a public movie theater, socializing with the narrator's family after church, or being seen together throwing "something" off a bridge in public).
Gentry continually dismissed speculation that the song was autobiographical. At the height of the song's popularity, numerous rumors circulated that she had been questioned by Mississippi police.
[edit] Novel and screenplay adaptations
The song's popularity proved so enduring that in 1976, nine years after its release, Warner Bros. commissioned author Herman Raucher to adapt it into a novel and screenplay, Ode to Billy Joe (note different spelling). The poster's tagline, which treats the film as being based on actual events and even gives a date of death for Billy (June 3, 1953), led many to believe that the song was based on actual events. In fact, when Raucher met Bobbie Gentry in preparation for writing the novel and screenplay, she confessed that she herself had no idea why Billie Joe killed himself. In Raucher's novel and screenplay, Billy Joe kills himself after a drunken homosexual experience, and the object thrown from the bridge is the narrator's ragdoll.
Billy Joe's story is analyzed in Professor John Howard's history of gay Mississippi entitled Men Like That: A Queer Southern History as an archetype of what Howard calls the "gay suicide myth".
[edit] Parody
Bob Dylan's 1967 "Clothesline Saga," (on the album The Basement Tapes) is a parody of the song. It mimics the conversational style of "Ode to Billie Joe" with lyrics concentrating on routine household chores.[4] The shocking event buried in all the mundane details is the revelation that "The Vice-President's gone mad!". Dylan's song was originally titled 'Answer to "Ode"'[5]
The Austin Lounge Lizards' "Shallow End of the Gene Pool", from their 1995 album Small Minds, is melodically similar to "Ode to Billie Joe", and ends with the line "and that's why Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge".
The November 15, 2008 Saturday Night Live featured Kristen Wiig and guest host Paul Rudd (with guitar) in a skit as a duo covering the song's melody, but with lyrics regarding a delivery man attempting to deliver a package, reading off the tracking numbers, etc.
[edit] Translations and adaptations
In 1967 American/French singer-songwriter Joe Dassin had much success with a French translation of the song, that tells exactly the same story almost word for word, only with the characters reversed. The narrator is one of the sons of the household, and the character who committed suicide is a girl named Marie-Jeanne Guillaume.
A quick overview of the translated names and places:
| Bobbie Gentry | Joe Dassin |
| 3rd of June | 4th of June |
| Billie Joe McAllister | Marie-Jeanne Guillaume |
| Tallahatchie Bridge | Pont de la Garonne |
| Choctaw Ridge | Bourg-les-Essonnes |
| Brother Taylor | unnamed: just "the sister of that young priest" |
| Tom | Le Grand Nicolas |
| Becky Thompson | unnamed |
| Tupelo | unnamed |
Besides the change in character names and locations, there are also obvious changes to various environments like the food, the crops, etc. For example, instead of "Pickin'cotton", the narrator took care of the vineyards.
The setting is a fictitious small town in south west France. The river Garonne however is real.
[edit] Chart positions
[edit] Bobbie Gentry
| Chart (1967) | Peak position |
| U.S. Billboard Hot Adult Contemporary Tracks | 7 |
| U.S. Billboard Black Singles | 8 |
| U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles | 17 |
| U.S. Billboard Hot 100 | 1 |
[edit] Margie Singleton
| Chart (1967) | Peak position |
| U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles | 39 |
[edit] References
- ^ "Grammy.com winners search". http://www.grammy.com/GRAMMY_Awards/Winners/Results.aspx?title=Ode%20to%20Billie%20Joe&winner=&year=0&genreID=0&hp=1. Retrieved 2008-11-05.
- ^ Tobler, John (1992). NME Rock 'N' Roll Years (1st ed.). London: Reed International Books Ltd. pp. 239. CN 5585.
- ^ http://www.countrypolitan.com/bio-bobbie-gentry.php
- ^ Dylan, Bob (1975). "Bob Dylan: "Clothesline"". The Basement Tapes. http://bobdylan.com/songs/clothesline.html. Retrieved 2007-12-27.
- ^ Greil Marcus (1997). Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. New York: Henry Holt. pp. 286. ISBN 0-8050-339-3.
[edit] External links
- The Mystery of Billy Joe
- Discussion about the song
- Included in the Billboard Book of Number One Hits
| Preceded by "All You Need Is Love" by The Beatles |
Billboard Hot 100 number one single August 26-September 16, 1967 |
Succeeded by "The Letter" by Box Tops |
