by Scott Peeples
The Wikipedia page for “Ode to Billie Joe” lists its genre as “Gothic Country,” but the Wikipedia page on “Gothic Country” is considerably shorter than the one on “Ode to Billie Joe.” Which tells you something: this song is bigger than the genre that supposedly contains it. It was a huge hit — number one on the Billboard singles chart in 1967, sold a million copies in six weeks. I was four years old when it came out, so I don’t really remember the sensation it created, but I do remember it as a song that was always around when I was growing up. Everybody knew the song, and nobody knew what Billie Joe McAllister and the singer threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
You’ve probably heard the song, but just in case: It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day . . . the singer is a young woman, probably in her late teens, living in rural Mississippi in the 1960s. The first four verses consist of her family’s dinner conversation, which revolves around the news that Billie Joe committed suicide. In fact, the first three verses end with the line “Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge” after providing a little more information about the incident or about Billie Joe. Each verse also includes dinner-table talk that has nothing to do with Billie Joe’s suicide, which to some listeners seems strange or even comic, and to others points to a lack of compassion on the part of the singer’s family:
And papa said to mama, as he passed around the blackeyed peas
Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense; pass the biscuits please
Gradually, the conversation reveals that the singer and Billie Joe were in some kind of relationship. In the fourth verse, the mother reveals that she heard from the “nice young preacher” that he had seen the singer and Billie Joe “throwing somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge.” In the fifth, final verse, the singer catches us up on other events in the community in the year since Billie Joe’s death — including her own father’s death from a virus and her mother’s depression resulting from it. The song ends with the enigmatic lines that echo the famous refrain:
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge
It’s a haunting song with a haunting arrangement to match. The primary instrument is a nylon-string acoustic guitar, on which Gentry plucks a simple blues progression, backed by an electric bass and a string section that accentuates the ends of the vocal lines. No drums, no guitar solo, very spare with a lot of open sonic space. The strings all but disappear in the last verse before creating a falling sound that mimic the last lines of the song. Gentry’s singing is direct and close-up, with no frills or gimmicks. She tells the story straight, which makes it even colder and sadder.
This is all incredibly Gothic, of course — not only the boy’s death but the mystery behind it and the fact that the singer knows the secret but doesn’t tell us. It’s one of the reasons the song was a hit. What did they throw off the bridge? What did it signify? Gentry wasn’t telling, but most of us thought it must have something to do with a breakup, maybe an unwanted pregnancy. Going back to Wikipedia now, I see that Gentry consistently said that the family’s indifference, treating the tragedy as just another topic of conversation, was what the song was really about. In that way, it reminds me of We Have Always Lived in the Castle (another 60s classic), in which tragedy becomes gossip and the community shows no compassion for their neighbors (at least not until they begin leaving them food).
While everyone in my generation was trying to figure out what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, pop songwriters produced a number of hits with similar Gothic vibes. There was “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia” by Vicki Lawrence (and, later, Reba McEntire), with an incredibly complicated plot for a 3-minute pop song, in which — spoiler alert — the singer turns out to be the murderer. There was “Angie Baby” by Helen Reddy, in which a lonely, intellectually impaired girl who spends all her time listening to the radio is stalked by a neighbor boy, whom she apparently kills (but possibly traps inside her radio). Both of these songs hit #1. I have other examples of the Gothic hits of my childhood, but I’ll spare you.
In 1976, almost a decade after “Ode” topped the charts, teen idol Robby Benson starred in the film Ode to Billy Joe (new spelling), a rare example of a feature film based on a pop song. In the film, Billy Joe discovers that he’s gay, which leads to his suicide.
There have been a few other recordings of “Ode to Billie Joe,” but it’s one of those records where the original performance is so crucial to the song’s effect that it’s almost impossible to cover. Remaking it is sort of like remaking Psycho — it can be done, but why? It’s a perfect recording, sad and creepy and as Gothic as anything we’ve studied this semester.
“What the song didn’t tell you, the movie will” (movieposters.com)
Capitol Records poster above public domain (Wikipedia)