Ode to Billie Joe

For the 1976 film based on the song, see Ode to Billy Joe (film).

"Ode to Billie Joe"
Single by Bobbie Gentry
from the album Ode to Billie Joe
B-side	"Mississippi Delta"
Released	July 1967
Format	7", 45rpm
Genre	Country, Country-pop, Blues
Length	4:15
Label	Capitol 5950
Writer(s)	Bobbie Gentry
Producer	Kelly Gordon
Bobbie Gentry singles chronology
"Requiem for Love" (with Jody Reynolds, 1963) "Ode to Billie Joe" (1967) "I Saw an Angel Die" (1967)
Audio sample file info · help

"Ode to Billie Joe" is a 1967 song written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry (born July 27, 1944), 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.

In this photograph from the November 10, 1967 issue of Life magazine, Bobbie Gentry strolls across the Tallahatchie Bridge in Money, Mississippi. The bridge collapsed in June 1972.^[2]

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 ("bought a store in Tupelo"). 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? Speculation ran rampant after the song hit the airwaves, and Gentry said in a November 1967 interview that it was the question most asked of her by everyone she met. She named flowers, a ring, a draft card, a bottle of LSD pills, and an aborted baby as the most often guessed items. Although she knew definitely what the item was, she wouldn't reveal it, saying only "Suppose it was a wedding ring." "It's in there for two reasons," she said. "First, it locks up a definite relationship between Billie Joe and the girl telling the story, the girl at the table. Second, the fact that Billie Joe was seen throwing something off the bridge -- no matter what it was -- provides a possible motivation as to why he jumped off the bridge the next day."^[3]

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.^[4] Gentry has, however, commented on the song, saying that its real theme was indifference:^[5]

“

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.^[2] 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.^[6][7]

Ironically the song's structure contains no bridge.

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.^[4] 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.^[8] 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"'.^[9]

Notes

1. ^ "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. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Tobler, John (1992). NME Rock 'N' Roll Years (1st ed.). London: Reed International Books Ltd. pp. 239. CN 5585. 
3. ^ An Actress with a Big Secret, Oxnard Press-Courier, November 19, 1967, p. 42. Page found 2011-07-30.
4. ^ ^{a b} Studer, Wayne (1994). Rock on The Wild Side: gay male images in popular music of the rock era. Leyland Publications. pp. 97–98. 
5. ^ "Biography". Ode to Bobbie Gentry. Archived from the original on 2009-10-26. http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/odetobobbiegentry/bio.htm&date=2009-10-25+23:55:13. 
6. ^ Bobbie Gentry artist biography at CountryPolitan.com
7. ^ 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.
8. ^ Dylan, Bob (1975). "Bob Dylan: "Clothesline"". The Basement Tapes. http://bobdylan.com/songs/clothesline.html. Retrieved 2007-12-27. 
9. ^ Greil Marcus (1997). Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes. New York: Henry Holt. pp. 286. ISBN 0-8050-339-3. 

External links

• The Mystery of Billy Joe
• 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