Another Sleepy, Dusty Delta Day

An ode to Bobbie Gentry's "Ode To Billy Joe"

I’ve read a couple of books on songwriting over the years and they all agree on getting the who, what, where and when covered as quickly as possible if you want to produce a compelling song. This song (along with Harry Chapin’s “Taxi”) gets that out of the way about as fast as any I’ve heard. Gentry spins a swirling gothic tale from the deep South that tells quite a story, but never lets us feel we’ve gotten the whole picture no matter how many characters and locales are introduced.

Time certainly falls through the hourglass for most characters in the song, but for the narrator that hourglass drips like quicksand. Life changes for everyone in very noticeable ways. For her though it now moves in a sort of slow, cruel cycle that returns her to the days surrounding the tragedy only to watch helplessly as Billy Joe jumps off the bridge continuously. Even if she closes her eyes he’s still in freefall. After all this time he still dies daily on radios throughout the world.

Wading through the verses the first thing you notice is that their dinner conversations were geographically and subject wise miles from the Cleaver household. Other than her appetite no one seems concerned with the narrator and the effect the news is having on her. The old man gets in his digs (and seconds) and lets it stand for gospel, the brother recalls some schoolboy prank while the mother brings it full circle by trying to speak well of the recently departed. Like any mother she withholds the news until everyone has wiped their feet. Incredibly no one even asks if anyone else has any thoughts as to why he took his leap to immortality. One small step for man, one giant leap for the music industry.

Speaking of the music industry, to fully understand the impact this song had on the world you have to consider the times when this song appeared. To say that it came out in late summer of 1967 is to only provide technical information. To be more precise it was the “summer of love.” (Or for me, a summer like any other on my street.)

In the real world though there was free love, the sex was clean and the air was dirty. “Sgt. Pepper’s…” was on every turntable, and reel to reel around the world. A war was raging, we hadn’t yet set foot on the moon, but it was inevitable. Headshops calling themselves “boutiques” were springing up on every corner. Everywhere there was hair and beads. Incense was wafting through the air. Drugs were the new alcohol. You needed to use both sides of a score card just to keep track of the changes and happenings in society. Then out of the ether comes a song by some Southern gal with an acoustic guitar about a teenage suicide involving a bridge that nobody could spell.

The song stormed up the charts and sat in the top spot like the old man on the mountain for a month. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone had their own forensic evidence as to what really happened and why. Again everyone focused on everybody but our heartbroken narrator.

The thing that makes “Ode To Billy Joe” a classic is the same thing that makes the film “Pulp Fiction” a classic. (I bet you never thought you’d see that song and movie in the same sentence) Think about it though: over the course of roughly four minutes we find out everything there is to know about this family and their eventual fates. However, we never find out why Billy took the plunge or what him and the girl were throwing off the bridge. (Forget the movie version of the song) In “Pulp Fiction” after close to three hours we have been taken on a dizzying ride that covers everything under the sun except resolving the actual impetus for the events of the film. We never learn what it was in the briefcase stolen from Marsalis Wallace. In both cases we hardly care, the ride and aftermath are really the story. Details only get in the way. Our guesses are as good as anyone’s. Call it what you will, the bottom line is it made us think.

The song eventually left the charts but it’s never left our conscious. It’s become a part of musical history and in a sense our own history. I would venture to say that you wouldn’t be able to use a single line from it in a trivia contest to stump someone. There isn’t a single throwaway line in the bunch, we know them all by heart at this point. It was one of those songs that told us life was complicated if we didn‘t already know it.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of Billy Joe’s historic jump. This blog entry though isn’t for him or his demons. It’s for the girl left behind who I bet hasn’t aged a day anytime this song echoes through the delta. Instead of offering you the lyrics or a video I’ll let you go out and find the song on your own and spend some quality time with it.