Ode to Billie Joe
| "Ode to Billie Joe" | |
|---|---|
| Song | |
| B-side | "Mississippi Delta" |
"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, resulting in three wins for Gentry and one win for arranger Jimmie Haskell.[1]
This song has sold over 3 million copies world-wide.
Plot
The 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,") and then recalls 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.
Questions arose among the listeners: what did Billie Joe and his girlfriend throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and why did Billie Joe commit suicide? One possible interpretation is that the the narrator had an abortion, and what she and Billie Joe throw off the bridge is the aborted baby, after which Billie Joe kills himself out of remorse.
When Herman Raucher met Gentry in preparation for writing a novel and screenplay based on the song, she confessed that she had no idea why Billie Joe killed himself.[2] Gentry has, however, commented on the song, saying that its real theme was indifference:[3]
Those questions are of secondary importance in my mind. The story of Billie Joe has two more interesting underlying themes. First, the illustration of a group of peoples' reactions to the life and death of Billie Joe, and its subsequent effect on their lives, is made. Second, the obvious gap between the girl and her mother is shown when both women experience a common loss (first Billie Joe, and later, Papa), and yet Mama and the girl are unable to recognize their mutual loss or share their grief.
The bridge mentioned in this song collapsed in June 1972.[4] It crossed the Tallahatchie River at Money, about ten miles north of Greenwood, Mississippi, and has since been replaced. The November 10, 1967 issue of Life Magazine contained a photo of Gentry crossing the original bridge.
Recording
"Ode to Billie Joe" was originally intended as the B-side of Gentry's first single recording, a blues number called "Mississippi Delta", on Capitol Records. The original recording, with no other musicians backing Gentry's guitar, had eleven verses lasting seven minutes, telling more of Billie Joe's story. The executives realized that this song was a better option for a single, so they cut the length by almost half and re-recorded it with a string orchestra. The shorter version left more of the story to the listener's imagination, and made the single more suitable for radio airplay.[5][6]
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. 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.[2] 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.
The film, directed and produced by Max Baer, Jr, was released in 1976, starring Robby Benson and Glynnis O'Connor.
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".
Translations
In 1967 American/French singer-songwriter Joe Dassin had much success with a French translation of the song titled "Marie-Jeanne", 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 |
| 3 June | 4 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 "Choppin' cotton", the narrator took care of the vineyards. The setting is a fictitious small town in southwest France. The River Garonne, however, is real.
In 1968, a Swedish translation by Olle Adolphson titled "Jon Andreas visa" was recorded by Siw Malmkvist. It is faithful to the story in "Ode to Billie Joe", but has changed the setting to rural Sweden. The name of Billie Joe has been changed to the Swedish name Jon Andreas.
Chart positions
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 |
Margie Singleton
| Chart (1967) | Peak position |
| U.S. Billboard Hot Country Singles | 39 |
Parodies
- 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.[7] 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"'.[8]
- 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 episode of 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.
- The skit "Went with the Wind" from a 1976 episode of The Carol Burnett Show features a tongue-in-cheek reference to the song. As Burnett greets her guests in the beginning of the skit, she is surprised to see "Billy Joe" among them as she thought he had "jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge".
Notes
- ^ "Grammy.com winners search". Retrieved 2008-11-05.
- ^ a b Studer, Wayne - Rock on The Wild Side: gay male images in popular music of the rock era, Leyland Publications, 1994 Pages 97-98 Accessed via Google Books June 7, 2010
- ^ "Biography". Ode to Bobbie Gentry. Archived from the original on 2009-10-26.
- ^ Tobler, John (1992). NME Rock 'N' Roll Years (1st ed.). London: Reed International Books Ltd. p. 239. CN 5585.
- ^ Bobbie Gentry artist biography at CountryPolitan.com
- ^ In an interview with Bob Harris broadcast by BBC Radio 2 in Bob Harris Country on 16 April 2009, singer Rachel Harrington claimed that Gentry originally wrote eleven verses, but deleted six because a record producer thought the song was too long.
- ^ Dylan, Bob (1975). "Bob Dylan: "Clothesline"". The Basement Tapes. Retrieved 2007-12-27.
- ^ Greil Marcus (1997). Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. New York: Henry Holt. p. 286. ISBN 0-8050-339-3.
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External links