Ode to Billie Joe
Ode to Billie Joe is a famous song created and interpreted by the American singer Bobbie Gentry in 1967. One month after its publication during the summer 1967, this song was propelled number one of the American charts. Many artists of all musical tendencies took it again thereafter besides: Franck Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Dassin in French with Marijuana , etc
The musical accompaniment in the original version of Bobbie Gentry is very stripped: an acoustic guitar played by Gentry and of the violoncellos which come to be added to the syncopated rate/rhythm of the guitar.
Words of the song
The somewhat mysterious words of this song caused innumerable articles, mainly in the United States. The fact is that their interpretation is prone to conjectures. The topic of the song is serious since it is referred to the suicide of a teenager named Billie Joe MacAlistair.
Comment of the account
The singer-narrator is a young country-woman of the delta of the Mississippi. She tells us that one day dusty of June, after having worked with the fields during the morning with her brother, she returns to the family farm for the meal. During conversations during the lunch, she learns that a boy named Billie Joe MacAlistair threw top of the bridge on the river Tallahachee .
This news, however dramatic, is announced by his/her mother as if it were about an event of no importance. The father pronounced in a few words the funeral oration of the boy by declaring, between two mouthfuls, that Billie Joe was not worth large thing and would in any event have arrived at nothing good in the life. The brother of the narrator seems, for its part, to have been formerly a friend of Billie Joe and recalls to his sister the day when him and Billie had slipped a frog to him into its back.
The mother notes that the narrator does not have suddenly any more appetite. Many listeners wondered why: would the news of died of Billie Joe be there for something? One can suppose that our narrator knew it, and probably better than his/her parents imagine it.
Then the mother declares that somebody told him to have seen the day before, with Choctaw Ridge , Billie Joe on the bridge of Tallahachee. It was with a girl who resembled the narrator curiously. Then both threw something in muddy water of the river.
With these words, the listener can again question himself: was this the narrator who was with Billie Joe and whom they threw in the river? If it is the case, wouldn't they have loved each other secretly and this would not be the body of a child still-born child or fallen through who they would have made disappear in order to hide their relation? Taken remorse in front of the gravity of its gesture, Billie Joe could then have committed suicide…
The narrator takes again then the wire of her account one year after this meal. She tells us that his brother married, left the family hearth to open a shop with his wife with Tupelo. The father died in spring of a bad influenza. As for the mother, it seems from now on disabled and shot down.
The narrator closes her history by teaching us that it often goes from now on to Choctaw Ridge . To gather there flowers which it then throws the top of the bridge on the river Tallahachee . These two last sentences seem to finally inform the listener on the interpretation which it can give to the text of the song: the young narrator and Billie Joe probably liked, and of a secret love.
Point of view of the author
Questioned in the middle of the years 1970 by a journalist, the singer Bobbie Gentry declared that, when it had composed the text of her song ten years earlier, it had never thought of giving such an interpretation to her work. For it, Ode to Billie Joe was to be only one history, presented like a section of life (daily discussions during a family meal) among modest and hard people to the task, and where an extremely serious event (the suicide of a teenager) was commented on like a news item of no importance.
The topic of Ode to Billie Joe was thus not a history of love secret, impossible and dramatic between two teenagers, but terrifying it indifference of certain rough beings vis-a-vis the mortal despair of their next.
Be delirious of interpretations
Seldom song will not have made run as much ink and will have caused as many different interpretations, of which some completely delirious: for the needs for a film éponyme, a scenario writer little inspired went until imagining that Billie Joe, ashamed and taken remorse, had been sucidé because it had had a furtive one evening homosexual relation and a state of intoxication!
Conclusion
Except the many - and deads - interrogations which it caused, Ode to Billie Joe is regarded as one of the ten plus beautiful songs of the twentieth century.