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Max's Musings #1063659 added February 6, 2024 at 7:01pm
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Ode to Billie Joe
In August, 1967 I was getting ready to start my senior year in high school. Lyndon Johnson announced he was sending 45,000 troops to Viet Nam. Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles, committed suicide. The fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, was number one at the box office. The Carol Burnett Show would begin its run next month, in September.
But what everyone was talking about that August was what Billie Joe McAllister and his girlfriend threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
When Bobby Gentry recorded her song earlier that summer at Capitol Tower in Los Angeles, the studio expected no one would ever hear it. They threw in some strings to accompany her spare chords and southern-fried voice and slapped it on the “B” side of something called “Mississippi Delta.” No one remembers the “A” side, even though the record sold 750,000 copies in the first week of its release. It was the “Ode to Billie Joe” that propelled an otherwise forgettable 45 to eventual platinum status.
Gentry later pointed out that what they throw off he bridge doesn’t matter. It’s what Hitchock would have called a Maguffin. What matters is the cold indifference of the characters, revealed as the song evolves. They sit around the dinner table, passing the fried chicken, talking about the suicide without even realizing Billie Joe’s girlfriend is right there with them. It’s what the characters say, and don’t say, that matters. The song tells a story. Gentry is an artistic genius of the same order as Flannery O’Connor, whose stories were equally compelling.
The dinner that the family shares resonates because it’s an echo of so many family gatherings, where what’s not said is more important that what is.
This song inspired me to write my own little gothic tale, based roughly on the sequence in the song. I set my story in Oklahoma and added some local references, such as having the bridge be on old Route 66, the “Mother Road.” The story is at
Later in 1967, Gentry would give a stunning live performance of the song on the Smothers Brothers show—another relic of the era. I can sill remember seeing it on my parent’s bulky old black and white TV. That’s the performance linked below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EPzqAGsh24
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