"It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day”: the opening lyrics to the Bobby Gentry hit, Ode to Billie Joe. 10 things you might not know about the song.
The B side was Mississippi Delta, which in the beginning was going to be the A side, until Capitol Records producer Kelly Gordon asked Gentry for a B side. She sent in a demo of Ode to Billie Joe and it was decided that was the hit.
The original song was much longer than the single version. It had 11 verses and was over 7 minutes long, which it was decided was too much, so it was edited down to five verses.
The verses which were cut included a mention of the anonymous narrator’s name: "People don’t see Sally Jane in town anymore … There’s a lot of speculatin’, she’s not actin’ like she did before … Some say she knows more than she’s willin’ to tell … But she stays quiet and a few think it’s just as well…”.
In the film based on the song, however, she’s called Bobbie Lee Hartley. The movie, released in 1976, was an attempt to explain why Billie Joe killed himself and the relationship between him and the narrator. In the film, they are dating, against her family’s wishes. Billie Joe gets drunk one night and has sex with a man, and it’s the shame of that (the film is set in 1953) and the fact he realises he liked it, and then can’t perform when Bobbie Lee agrees to go all the way with him, that leads him to jump off the bridge.
The lyrics include a verse describing how the young preacher says he saw Billie Joe and a girl who looked a lot like the narrator throwing something off the Bridge. There has been plenty of speculation as to what that was. Theories included a baby, a wedding ring, or Flowers, and that whatever it was it was connected to the later suicide. Bobby Gentry claimed she didn’t know herself what the object was, and also said it really didn’t matter. In the movie, the object was Bobbie Lee’s rag doll, symbolising the loss of her innocence.
Gentry’s take on the song was that it was "a study in unconscious cruelty", showing people so wrapped up in the minutiae of their lives (five more acres in the lower forty to plough; pass the black eyed peas; relating how Billie Joe put a Frog down someone’s back at a picture show and how he never had a lick of sense) that they have no empathy for others. The mother complains that the narrator isn’t eating which upsets her because she was cooking all morning, but doesn’t ask if anything is wrong. It’s clear the only person even remotely bothered that a young man killed himself is the narrator.
The song ends with a post script from a year later with an update about the family. The brother is married and lives in Tupelo, Mississippi; the father caught a virus and died, leaving the mother distraught and grieving. The narrator goes to the bridge, picks some flowers and throws them off.
The Tallahatchie Bridge is real. It crosses the Tallahatchie River in a tiny community called Money, Mississippi, ten miles north of Greenwood, Mississippi. There is a famous photo of Bobby Gentry walking across it. After the song was released, any number of would be suicides flocked to the bridge, causing a nuisance to the locals. The local authorities there had to pass a by-law forbidding anyone from jumping off on pain of $100 fine. The bridge is actually only 20 feet high and so anyone who did jump off would probably survive to get prosecuted. In 1972, vandals set fire to it, causing it to collapse. It has since been rebuilt.
Bob Dylan recorded a parody of the song called Clothes Line Saga, which imitated the conversational style with an emphasis on household chores. The shocking event buried in all the mundane details is a revelation that "The Vice-President's gone mad!."
Ode to Billie Joe won three Grammy awards and was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023.
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