No one has plausibly suggested a real-life model for the events recounted in the song, but there are many theories about them. That brutal, brilliant edit created a multi-million selling masterpiece, but it also launched a frenzy of speculation about the story it told. Record executives, scenting a hit, cut it from nearly eight minutes to four, excised six verses, added strings – and the rest, as they say, is pop history. She accompanied herself on guitar and, in just 40 minutes of studio time, delivered an 11-verse version of ‘Ode’. Gentry, then unknown, was invited by Capitol to record two self-written songs (‘Mississippi Delta’ being the other). But the answers to the song’s questions – what did the unnamed narrator and Billie Joe MacAllister throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and why did he jump to his death on the morning the song begins? – have hung tantalisingly out of reach for more than half a century.įor all its mysteries, the song is a masterpiece of concision, evoking the hard, hot working life of the Deep South in a few simple phrases and establishing a mass of detail about a poor farming family in just five perfect verses. Three weeks later, ‘Ode’ was number one in the US Billboard charts, where it stayed for a month when such things meant enormous sales and a fortune for its unheralded performer. So begins one of the greatest, and most mysterious, hit songs of the Sixties, ‘Ode to Billie Joe’, recorded by Bobbie Gentry, a part-time swimsuit model from the wrong side of the tracks in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, in July 1967. I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was balin’ hay… It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day.
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