Wall of Paul

Don’t trust that former majorette look— the woman pictured above actually wrote and recorded one of the more brilliantly unnerving songs in pop music history.

Lou Reed parades junkies and snarling S&M queens through the mean streets of New York to rattle his listeners. The dread in Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” however, arises from hard-working country folks who are theoretically the salt of the earth, but can’t generate all that much sympathy when a young man they know throws himself to his death from a nearby bridge.

In this spot-on portrait of emotional isolationism, Gentry’s characters gossip at length around a dining room table without saying a goddamned thing...or, at least, nothing about the toll that staring straight ahead, doing your work, and ignoring the big, bad, encroaching world can have on your soul.

The song’s unnamed narrator is a young Mississippi girl who’s come in from the fields with her father and brother to eat the lunch that Mama’s been cooking all morning. Interspersed among requests to pass the biscuits and cut some apple pie, we come to find that Billy Joe MacAllister, an apparent wild-child who used to hang out with Brother, has inexplicably jumped from the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Everyone has an opinion about Billy Joe— including Father, who helpfully notes the deceased “never had a lick of sense” anyway. It’s all perfectly disheartening, but, soon enough, Mama wonders aloud why the narrator hasn’t even touched her food.

The listener begins to wonder, too. There’s a lot going on beneath the surface in “Ode to Billy Joe,” just as there is in any small town, and Gentry, in a move worthy of Flannery O’Connor, lets you determine the real story for yourself.

Initially, it’s easy to imagine the girl is appalled at the casual way Billy Joe’s death is being discussed, and that’s certainly a pivotal element of the lyric. But when Mother notes that the town's preacher thought he saw a girl who looked a lot like the narrator throwing something off the bridge with Billy Joe just the other day, a broad range of dreadful interpretations suddenly come into view.

What were they throwing off that bridge, and why isn’t the girl talking about it? And what, exactly, was her relationship with Billy Joe? Surely, she must know why this kid killed himself, but it would seem that she’s either too mortified or too guilty to speak up. Though the song rolls along on a plaintively-plucked acoustic guitar and rising string arrangement, her silence nearly drowns everything out.

The result is fascinating and unspeakably troubling, a ghostly soul-mate to Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man.” Gentry had a lot of guts writing the song, and it’s a miracle it got played on the radio. But it did, over and over again.

“Ode to Billy Joe” became a massive hit during the period when Bob Dylan was holed-up in Woodstock, recording songs with a group of men who would soon come to be known as The Band. Dylan, who knows a thing or two about enigmatic tunes, was moved enough by Gentry’s work to pen a response song, “Clothesline Saga,” which has often been bootlegged, but remains officially unreleased. It speaks volumes about “Ode to Billy Joe” to say that Dylan didn’t come within shouting distance of Gentry’s sad, evocatively dismayed vision.

Simply put, "Ode to Billy Joe" is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece. Download it.

”Ode to Billy Joe" by Bobbie Gentry. Album: “Chickasaw County Child: The Artistry of Bobbie Gentry” (1967).

Paul Tatara