Her father says: ‘”Well, Billie Joe never had a lick o’ sense, pass the biscuits please”. Aside from the question of what may have happened, the lyrics also portray the context: the narrator’s family’s emotional distance, impassive and unmoved by Billie Joe’s death. I say “narrator” because Ode to Billie Joe feels more like a short story: it creates and sustains a certain uneasy atmosphere. Stranger still: before his death, what were Billie Joe and the “girl that looked a lot like” the narrator throwing from the bridge? Who was Billie Joe McAllister and why did he die? In Gentry’s song Ode to Billie Joe, a hit single that knocked the Beatles’ All You Need Is Love from the top of the US charts, McAllister is reported, by the narrator’s mother, to have jumped from the Tallahatchee Bridge. Then Bobbie Gentry’s cool vocals came in and, in a little over four minutes, told a deeply gothic Southern tale about a mystery that you couldn’t quite solve, suffused by a darkness she refused to illuminate. When the needle dropped you would have heard the insistent strum of what sounded like a small guitar in a big room, and then the woozy swoop of a string section as it slid down along a minor scale.
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