1967 was the year the ‘Summer of Love’ turned into the “Summer of Rage’. While tens of thousands of young people did descend into San Francisco with flowers in their hair, race riots were seeing over 150 cities burning in flames. Dozens were killed; thousands were injured; countless more arrested. Vietnam war protesters were being beaten by the National Guard.
Amidst this national train wreck of a summer, a song hit the airwaves which was so haunting, so engrossing, and so well-crafted it made everyone—if not stop all together—at least pause. ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ was sung by an unknown raven-haired singer from Chickasaw County named Bobbie Gentry. Listening to it in their vehicles, numerous people in Los Angeles ploughed into the car ahead of them. It was that hypnotic.
‘Ode to Billie Joe’ has a girl tell the story of how her boyfriend—Billie Joe McAllister—kills himself by jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge; and how gossip has reached her family that she and Billie Joe were seen throwing something off that very bridge only days before. Her family tries to recount what they can remember about Billie Joe around the dinner table; the girl unable to lift her fork. “Outside the kitchen window,” the record reviewer for ‘Rolling Stone’ wrote, “camped an entire country, listening in.”
There are two mysteries attached to this song. The first is the most obvious, and the most frustrating. What did Billie Joe and his girlfriend throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge that caused him to kill himself? The song gives absolutely no answers at all; and Gentry was cryptic about it. As she told ‘Billboard Magazine,’ “Everybody has a different guess as to what was thrown off the bridge — flowers, a ring, even a baby. Anyone who hears the song can think anything they want.” Less than helpful.
“Billie” was changed to “Billy” in the 1976 film ‘Ode to Billy Joe,’ starring Robbie Benson and Glynnis O’Conner. Directed by Max Baer Jr. (best known for playing Jethro on ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’), the film has the main characters throwing a rag-doll off the bridge, and Billy killing himself for having sex with a man. While the films states the sex act was consensual, the novelization of the film states Billy was forced. Case closed. But this was only Jethro’s … I mean Max Baer’s interpretation of the song. Gentry told him to film whatever story he wanted to.
It wasn’t until 2003 when the connection to Emmet Till was made. Till was lynched by white supremacists in 1955, the 14-year-old’s body tied to a cotton gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River, off the very same bridge as the song. A white woman said Till has whistled at her, which he never did, but she allowed him to be brutally murdered anyway. Did Billy Joe participate in Till’s murder? Is this why he killed himself? Would Bobbie Gentry finally confirm the meaning of her song?
This brings us to the second mystery. Bobbie Gentry disappeared in 1981. Not as in “missing person” disappeared; but in leaving the public eye for good. No one in the entertainment industry has heard from her since then.
Born in 1942 and raised in Greenwood, Mississippi, Gentry relocated to California as a teen to try her hand at songwriting. Which she excelled at, selling numerous songs to others while she learned recording and producing. But the ache in her voice when she sang ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ had Capitol Records printing half-a-million copies of her first full album, twice as many as they did for the Beatles that year.
Gentry would release half-a-dozen more records, host her own television show, and headline her own Elvis-type show in Vegas. Her final appearance was in 1981, on the television special ‘All-Star Salute to Mother’s Day,’ singing ‘Mama, a Rainbow’ to her mother. And that was the last anyone heard of or from Gentry.
Jill Sobule’s song ‘Where is Bobbie Gentry,’ found on her 2009 album ‘California Years,’ imagines different scenarios to where Gentry might be. So does Philadelphia journalist Tara Murtha, whose 2014 book ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ interviewed musicians, friends, and anyone connected to Gentry. Both had hoped to hear from Gentry after their projects were complete; both have not.
We may never know what drove Billie Joe to suicide, or to why Gentry turned her back on her music career. Perhaps solving these mysteries are beyond the point.
Mike Selby is Programs & Community Development Librarian at the Cranbrook Public Library