Ode to Billie Joe
| "Ode to Billie Joe" | |||||||||
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| Single by Bobbie Gentry | |||||||||
| from the album Ode to Billie Joe | |||||||||
| B-side | "Mississippi Delta" | ||||||||
| Released | July 1967 | ||||||||
| Format | 7", 45rpm | ||||||||
| Recorded | July 10, 1967, Capitol Studio C, Hollywood, California, United States | ||||||||
| Genre | Country | ||||||||
| Length | 4:15 | ||||||||
| Label | Capitol | ||||||||
| Writer(s) | Bobbie Gentry | ||||||||
| Producer(s) | Kelly Gordon | ||||||||
| Bobbie Gentry singles chronology | |||||||||
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"Ode to Billie Joe" is a 1967 song written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry, a singer-songwriter from Chickasaw County, Mississippi. The single, released in late July, was a number-one hit in the United States, and became a big international seller. Billboard ranked the record as the No. 3 song for 1967 (the other two were #2 "The Letter" by the Box Tops and #1 "To Sir With Love" by Lulu). The song is ranked #412 on Rolling Stone's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The recording of "Ode to Billie Joe" generated eight Grammy nominations, resulting in three wins for Gentry and one win for arranger Jimmie Haskell.
The song is a first-person narrative that reveals a Southern Gothic tale in its verses by including the dialog of the narrator's family at dinnertime on the day that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge." Throughout the song, the suicide and other tragedies are contrasted against the banality of everyday routine and polite conversation.
The song begins with the narrator, her brother and her father returning, after agricultural morning chores, to the family house for dinner (on June 3). After cautioning them about tracking in dirt, "Mama" says that she "got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge" that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge," apparently to his death.
At the dinner table, the narrator's father is unsurprised at the news and says, "Well, Billie Joe never had a lick o' sense; pass the biscuits, please" and mentions that there are "five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow." Although her brother seems to be somewhat taken aback ("I saw him at the sawmill yesterday ... And now you tell me Billie Joe has jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"), he's not shocked enough to forgo a second piece of pie. The brother recalls that while he was with his friends Tom and Billie Joe, they had put a frog down the narrator's back at the Carroll County Picture Show, and that he had seen her and Billie Joe together last Sunday speaking after church. Late in the song, Mama questions the narrator's complete change of mood ("Child, what's happened to your appetite? I been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched a single bite") and then recalls a visit earlier that morning by Brother Taylor, the local preacher, who mentioned that he had seen Billie Joe and a girl who looked very much like the narrator herself and they were "throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge."
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