A story song that echoes across centuries (well, 20th and 21st C): Ode to Billie Joe

Bobbie Gentry, a Mississippi singer/songwriter, wrote several great story songs. “Fancy” is my favorite, the story of a poor but beautiful girl being coached by her mama how to sell herself to the highest bidder. Okay, that’s kind of a disturbing lesson, but the song ends “happily,” with the brilliant line, “I may have been born just poor white trash, but Fancy is my name.” (Interestingly, later Bobbie Gentry married a rich older man and got a good settlement in the divorce. Mama would be proud.)

Bobbie Gentry’s most famous story song, one made into a (lousy) TV film, was the 1967 “Ode to Billie Joe.” This is the story of a boy in a Mississippi town who jumps off a bridge to his death, told by a girl-friend who seems to be the only one who cares. Earlier in the week, someone witnessed the two of them “throwing something off the Tallahatchee Bridge.” This line inspired much speculation—what was that something?—but that’s not the real mystery of the song.

Why doesn’t anyone care about this boy’s suicide?

The Start of the Story

The song is set in a real place, Money, MS, near where Bobbie Gentry grew up. Choctaw Ridge and the Tallahatchie River are also real places. The song opens with a note-perfect description of the midday meal of a farm family in the Delta:

Was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day.
I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay.
And at dinnertime we stopped and walked back to the house to eat,
And Mama hollered out the back door y’all remember to wipe your feet.

That precise identification of time and place and characters immediately leads into the story conflict:

And then she said I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge,
Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

The Middle

This would be shocking news at most dinner tables, but this family shrugs it off:

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.
There’s five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow.

One person does make a perfunctory expression of regret, connecting the event to some local superstition about Billie Joe’s chosen jumping place:

And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow.
Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge,
And now Billie Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Notice how Gentry creates a true dialogue, by having Mama’s line rhyme with Papa’s.

Another family member has a slightly more personal response, and a “recollection” of an experience with Billie Joe and the narrator. This humanizes them, and adds detail to the paradoxically cozy rural setting:

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe

Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show.
And wasn’t I talkin’ to him after church last Sunday night?
I’ll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don’t seem right.
I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge.
And now you tell me Billie Joe’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

At this point, the narrator is just reporting, but something changes with the mention of her own relationship to Billie Joe:

Mama said to me, Child, what’s happened to your appetite?
I’ve been cookin’ all mornin’ and you haven’t touched a single bite.

The Mystery

Finally there’s that mystery element:
That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today,
Said he’d be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way.
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge,
And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Now the songwriter has said that there’s really no mystery, that whatever it is (NOT a baby or a doll or a wedding ring or any of the other speculations) is only meant to reinforce that the narrator and Billie Joe had a relationship, maybe a friendship, maybe a romance. The real mystery is why no one else in the family realizes that their girl might be suffering, that this news would be a terrible shock, that maybe that nice young preacher should be called in to help—that Billie Joe’s suicide is more than just a gossip item.

Yes, this family seems weirdly complacent both about the suicide and the daughter’s grief. And that’s the real mystery. Are they sociopathic? Or just preoccupied with the difficulties of farming and rural poverty?

Let’s ponder the meaning of this, and come back for Part 2 for the ending and those echoes through the centuries.

Part Two of Billie Joe post.