Ode to Bobbie Gentry

Or: Tallahatchie Unabridged

Was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day

— “Ode to Billie Joe,” Bobbie Gentry

Bobbie Gentry never said what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge in her 1967 hit song “Ode to Billie Joe.” She said it didn’t matter. She said it was a symbol, not a thing.

Her every answer said: You’re missing the point.

Because as she told Billboard writer Fred Bronson, years later:

“The song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty. But everybody seems more concerned with what was thrown off the bridge than they are with the thoughtlessness of people expressed in the song — and what was thrown off the bridge really isn’t that important.”

Still, it was a national parlor game in that so-called Summer of Love, when the country seemed in need of respite from the riots in its cities, the war in Vietnam — seemed to need respite even the movies weren’t providing, in that season of “Bonnie and Clyde,” with its savage death-scene finale, a film that critic Pauline Kael famously said “put the sting back into death.”

Tough to say, though, whether “Ode to Billie Joe” really was a diversion from reality, or reality scored with strings and pressed to vinyl — and let the needle drop, a literal finer point put on the tumult of those times. Because this was no pop confection with some bubble-gum chorus — it didn’t even have a chorus. Lyrically, it was dark, emotionally murky. There’s been a suicide, the first three verses ending with us being told Billie Joe McAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

If “Ode” was a diversion, it was a damned odd one. Or maybe it was a sociological experiment, in which Gentry’s premise about the unconscious cruelty of people became self-perpetuating. Because by dwelling on the mystery above all else, the listening public — Americans from coast to coast — proved themselves as shallow, as self-absorbed, as callous, as the young female narrator’s family at dinner, where the topic of Billie Joe’s suicide is discussed as if it were a ballgame or the weather.

And Papa said to Mama, as he passed around the black-eyed peas
‘Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please’

Mama notices the daughter — the narrator — has lost her appetite, but there’s no empathy, just some huffiness over her efforts in the kitchen going unappreciated.

I’ve been cookin’ all mornin’, and you haven’t touched a single bite

Then mama tells the daughter what Brother Taylor, the nice, young preacher, told her — that he’d seen Billie Joe and “a girl that looked a lot like you” throw something off that same bridge from which Billie Joe would later jump.

“Everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge — flowers, a ring, even a baby,” Gentry told Bronson. “Anyone who hears the song can think what they want, but the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. They sit there eating their peas and apple pie and talking, without even realizing that Billie Joe’s girlfriend is sitting at the table, a member of the family.”

It must have been great fun for Americans, back in the long, hot summer of 1967, dragging the river in their minds for that mystery object. Flowers, ring, baby? Draft notice, gun, drugs? They were missing the message, of course, but then nobody ever turned on Top 40 radio for a discussion of Kantian Ethics.

Everybody loves a mystery, and they were hearing a good one, a purely American one, spun by some young, homegrown version of old, dead Agatha Christie.

When really she was a new Flannery O’Connor, with a Southern Gothic tale about the casual cruelty of people, about how tragedy is just another side dish at the family dinner table, pass the biscuits, please.