08-12-2009, 11:16
YouTube - Bobbie Gentry - Ode To Billy Joe
from wikipedia
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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".
from wikipedia
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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".