The Secret Life of Bobbie Gentry, Pioneering Artist Behind 'Ode to Billie Joe'
In July of 1967, Capitol Records released "Ode to Billie Joe," a
spooky wisp of a song by an unknown artist named Bobbie Gentry. Industry
wisdom said "Ode" was too dark, too long, too different to get played
on the radio.
It was a smash hit. With no special promotion, the song unexpectedly
climbed up the charts past the Doors, Aretha Franklin and the Beatles,
ultimately knocking "All You Need is Love" out of the Number One spot.
By August, the mysterious tale of Billie Joe McAllister jumping off the
Tallahatchie Bridge was ubiquitous, the inescapable sound of the
darkening days of the so-called Summer of Love.
"That nice young preacher Brother Taylor dropped by today," Gentry sang. "Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday/Oh, by the way said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge/And she and Billie Joe was throwin' something off the Tallahatchie Bridge."
Listeners
wanted to knew two things: What did the song's narrator and Billie Joe
McAllister throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge? And secondly, who the hell
is Bobbie Gentry?
Fifty years later, neither question has been
answered. Most people guess it was a baby, a ring, or some other symbol
of secret love that dropped into the dark water, though Gentry
repeatedly said that question missed the point, which was indifference.
"This boy's death did not get his neighbors involved," she explained at
the time. She explained that the object thrown off the bridge was just a
way to establish motivation for Billie Joe's suicide. "I left it open
so the listener could draw his own conclusion."
As for the question of who Bobbie Gentry really is, she tried to tell us, but we wouldn't listen to that answer, either.
For
years after leaving Capitol Records, Bobbie Gentry plainly stated that
she produced "Ode to Billie Joe." She said it onstage, in industry
magazines like After Dark, and on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Producing a hit record was only the beginning of her pioneering career.
Gentry was the first woman to host a variety show on the BBC (later,
she hosted her own show on CBS). She was a DJ on Armed Forces Radio.
It's widely believed she painted the portraits used as the covers for
her albums Fancy and Patchwork. After leaving Capitol, she
headed to Las Vegas, where she spent a decade creating and starring in
shows critically acclaimed for over-the-top set design, outrageous
costumes she often designed herself and stellar choreography – including
a gender-bending tribute to Elvis Presley, performed in a skintight
glittering pantsuit.
The real Bobbie Gentry was not a country
bumpkin pin-up who lucked into one big hit, as she was sometimes
described in profiles that read as condescending from a modern
perspective. Bobbie Gentry embraced the success of "Ode to Billie Joe,"
but spent the rest of her career trying to transcend the hillbilly
persona that was created with it. Onstage, before performing "Ode to
Billie Joe," she'd explain that the song was authentic because she did
indeed grow up dirt-poor on her grandparents' farm near the Tallahatchie
Bridge in Chickasaw County, Mississippi – but also, she'd been studying
music and performing since she moved to California at 13 years old.
In
the early Eighties, less than 15 years after her breakout success,
Bobbie Gentry stopped trying to explain what her work meant, or who she
really was. She vanished from the spotlight, and continues to turn down
requests for interviews and invitations to perform.
Despite her
absence, Gentry's influence still runs deep and keeps tracing new paths.
In an era when collective cultural memory seems to run as deep as the
last Internet meme, young musicians, writers and producers continue to
cite Gentry as a major influence and inspiration.
Dave Cobb is a 43-year-old
Grammy Award–winning producer with a golden hand in some of the biggest
hits out of Nashville in recent years. Cobb has worked with artists
Jason Isbell, Anderson East and Sturgill Simpson, whose 2014
breakthrough Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, like Ode to Billie Joe, stylishly tweaked a classic country approach.
"[Ode to Billie Joe] was one of the records that drove me to
Southern music more, because you realize there was no boundaries on
Southern music," Cobb tells Rolling Stone. "It's such an odd
melting of psychedelica, true Southern music, folk and hippie culture,
all in one swoop, and very progressive at the same time."
"Mississippi Delta," released as the B side to "Ode to Billie," is a
raunchy, swampy rock anthem that Gentry belts out with gravelly voice
and no shortage of swagger. "Papa, Won't You Let Me Go to Town With You"
is a slice of Southern life that swings open with Gentry's signature
bossa nova–style strum. Like "Ode," "Papa" mines the tension between
appearances and reality. The orchestral strings whimsically slide and
bounce as if scoring an afternoon at the county fair, while the lyrics
relay the story of a young girl whose father won't take her downtown
with him, no matter how hard she scrubs the floor.
While working on the songs that would make up her debut album, also called Ode to Billie Joe,
Gentry told friends like former bandmate Frank Llacuna that her goal
was to make sophisticated country music. You certainly hear that, but
also glimmers of her interest in blending Southern Gothic writing into
baroque pop compositions, psychedelic rock, and musical theater –
elements that define her later work. In her short time at Capitol,
Gentry crafted a unique American songbook full of character-driven songs
that explore the joys, heartache, and paradoxes of Southern culture,
show business – and of being a woman navigating both.
Unsurprisingly,
cerebral feminist singer-songwriters like Jill Sobule and Rosanne Cash
often cite Gentry as a major influence. In fact, watching Gentry on the Smothers Brothers
as a kid in Denver is what inspired Sobule to pick up a guitar in the
first place (an experience she wrote about in the introduction to my
book about Gentry and Ode published by the 33 1/3 series).
Gentry's
influence runs into expected places, too. Dave Vanian of British punk
legends the Damned recently cited Gentry when asked about his favorite
artists. "Have you ever listened to Bobbie Gentry?" former Gossip
frontwoman Beth Ditto asked an interviewer while trying to explain the
inspiration behind her new solo record Fake Sugar. Adam Weiner,
songwriter and acrobatic frontman for rock & roll revivalists Low
Cut Connie, says discovering Gentry opened his mind to music's ability
to transport listeners to another place.
"As a hairy cross-eyed
Jewish kid from New Jersey, the deep South was just a remote and hazy
fantasy world that I could only access through snatches of music, movies
and books," Weiner tells Rolling Stone. "When Bobbie Gentry
sings … I feel like I'm with her in her private world of Southern
intrigue and longing, full of sadness, corruption, tragedy and romance."
Though celebrated for
her husky and soulful vocals, Gentry initially didn't want to sing
"Ode." She had a demo of "Ode to Billie Joe" sent to Capitol Records in
early 1967 to sell the song, not to sing it. She only sang on the demo
because it was cheaper than hiring someone else, and had Lou Rawls in
mind to record it. When Capitol asked Gentry to do both, she agreed –
but only so long as performing didn't get in the way of writing and
composing.
"She had a writing style all of her own," musician Tift Merritt tells Rolling Stone.
"All of these records are really driven by her guitar parts. They
create the room for the beautiful string arrangements, or
call-and-response vocal arrangements, the badass electric guitar, the
Muscle Shoals kind of beats. It all comes from that intrinsic phrasing
of her guitar and singing."
Bobbie Gentry had been hustling in the
music business for a decade when, on New Year's Eve 1967, she decided
to quit her gigs and do everything she could to get a songwriting deal. A
month later, in February, Gentry's publisher sent her demo to Capitol.
The original demo recording of "Ode to Billie Joe" was just Gentry's
guitar and vocals.
At Capitol, that demo landed in the hands of
producer Kelly Gordon. According to former Capitol record man David
Axelrod, he had to promise Gentry's publisher that they would not add a
rhythm section.
Gordon liked it, but decided it needed something
extra. Gordon called composer Jimmie Haskell and asked him to work up an
accompanying string arrangement, and to record it quickly with studio
time leftover from another artist's session. When Haskell arrived at the
studio, he found four violins and two cellos. To make it work, Haskell
hired bassist Jesse Erlich to pluck the cello as a bass. They recorded
it that night. According to Haskell, this recording was dubbed on top of
Gentry's tape. She never re-recorded the vocals or guitar at Capitol.
"It's her demo," Jimmie Haskell told me, "With my strings."
The
result transcends the sum of its parts. The mystery at the song's
center slowly boils beneath Haskell's lush, swirling strings. Gentry's
vocals are masterfully nuanced, opening the story on just another dusty
Delta day. By the time mama says she got some news from up on Choctaw
Ridge, however, we know it can't be any good. As Gentry closes in on the
awful truth beneath the water's skin, her voice deepens, constricting
around the vowels like a snake on a tree branch: "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge."
"Ode"
was originally supposed to be the B side to "Mississippi Delta," but
after the strings were added, it was moved up to the A side.
The
original 45 credits Gordon and a man named Bobby Paris, a musician and
producer who helped Gentry record the professional "demo" that contained
the bulk of her debut record. According to Bobby's widow Judith, Paris
recorded her demos in exchange for session guitar work. As was revealed
in the lawsuit that followed, Paris and Gentry struck a deal that cut
each other in on potential profits from any collaboration. In court,
Gentry testified that she called off the deal because, she said, Paris
misrepresented his role in landing her deal at Capitol.
At the
time, Paris was working of the Whitney Recording Studio in Glendale, a
go-to recording spot for Christian and gospel singers. Though the studio
is long closed and records lost, retired Whitney studio engineer Frank
Kejmer confirmed he recalled them working together, a recollection
corroborated by another person close to Paris at the time. Due to the
fallout, Paris' name was scrubbed from the credits of "Ode to Billie
Joe" by the time the LP was released. Bobbie Gentry never received
producer credit on it at all.
When the song exploded up the
charts in July, Capitol decided to record the rest of what would become
Gentry's full debut album, and to get it in stores by August 21st. The
foundations of most of the songs were on Gentry's tape, with just some
"sweetening sessions" scheduled at Capitol. When Capitol ordered 500,000
advance copies, Ode to Billie Joe became the most anticipated record in Capitol's history, crushing the previous record of 100,000 copies ordered of 1964's Meet the Beatles.
"Twenty-three
year old Bobbie Gentry is anything but the hillbilly folk singer you
might expect," is how one review went. "If she didn't have a Miss
America type figure (37-23-37) you might call her an intellectual."
Decades after Bobbie Gentry came and went, country
music's women problem is a well-documented crisis. After allowing for a
range of voices in the late Nineties and early 2000s, country radio has
regressed to the point where they're even refusing to play female voices that sell hundreds of thousands of records. In 2014, women sang eight percent of songs on country radio.
Outlaw
country musician and producer Angaleena Presley, best known as a member
of the Pistol Annies with Miranda Lambert and Ashley Monroe, has been called a "whistleblower" for addressing the grim situation with clever lyrics, witty defiance and sad resignation on her recent release Wrangled.
"It's sort of a man's world," Presley tells Rolling Stone. "You are just a girl in the midst of a testosterone sausage fest."
After co-producing her debut solo record with her husband in 2014, Presley independently produced Wrangled, a critically acclaimed record about country radio rejecting women that has been meta-rejected by country radio.
"The first question first people ask is, 'Who produced it?'" Presley tells Rolling Stone. "When I say me, they say your 'Bless your heart, you little thing.'"
Presley says that friends tell her "Mama, I Tried," off Wrangled,
is her "Fancy," the Gentry classic famously covered by Reba McEntire.
Bobbie herself said "Fancy" was her strongest statement for "women's
lib," while friends of Gentry have told me it was her take on record
business. In both songs, the women liken themselves to prostitutes, but
come to different conclusions. Presley sings it's getting too hard to
keep hanging on, while Gentry defiantly declared, "And I ain't done bad."
In
1983, Bobbie Gentry, for the first time in her career, canceled a show –
a gig she was scheduled to perform with Mac Davis. A self-declared
workaholic, Bobbie Gentry worked through broken bones, broken hearts,
and sheer exhaustion. Aside from a few industry events, Bobbie Gentry
never appeared in public as a performer again. She simply hung up her
heels and vanished, leaving us only her music and everything she already
told us, for anyone who wants to listen.
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