It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day...

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It happens every year-I get this stupid song stuck in my head:

Ode to Billie Joe

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door "y'all remember to wipe your feet"
And then she said "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge"
"Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
"Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please"
"There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"
And Mama said it was shame about Billy Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billy Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?
"I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don't seem right"
"I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge"
"And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

And Mama said to me "Child, what's happened to your appetite?"
"I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite"
"That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today"
"Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way"
"He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge"
"And she and Billy Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"

A year has come 'n' gone since we heard the news 'bout Billy Joe
And Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus going 'round, Papa caught it and he died last Spring
And now Mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge

And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge


I never did know why Billie Joe jumped, so I just did a little research. This is from Wikipedia, and for some reason I find it hilarious:

****************

This song is a first person narrative that reveals a quasi-Southern Gothic tale in its verses by including the dialog of the narrator's immediate family at dinnertime on the day that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge."

The song begins with the narrator and her brother returning, after morning chores, to the family house for dinner. 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," and mentions that there are "five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow." Although her brother seems to be 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 keep him from having a second piece of pie. Late in the song, Mama questions the narrator's complete loss of appetite ("Child, what's happened to your appetite? I been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched a single bite,") yet earlier in the song recalled a visit earlier that morning by Brother Taylor who is, apparently, the local preacher. He mentioned that he had seen Billie Joe and a girl who looked (to him) very much like the narrator herself and they were "throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge."

In the song's final verse, a year has passed, during which the narrator's brother has married and moved away. Also, her father died from a viral infection, which has left her mother despondent. The narrator herself now visits Choctaw Ridge often, picking flowers there to drop from the Tallahatchie Bridge onto the murky waters flowing beneath it.

The mysteries surrounding the characters in the song created something of a cultural sensation at the time and at least one urban legend. In 1975, Gentry told author Herman Raucher that she hadn't come up with a reason for Billie Joe's suicide when she wrote the song. She has stated in numerous interviews over the years that the focus of the song was not the suicide itself, but the rather matter-of-fact way that the narrator's family was discussing the tragedy over dinner, unaware that Billie Joe might well have been her boyfriend.

A popular speculation at the release of the song in 1967 (unsupported by either the song's lyrics or the culture of that area and time period) was that the narrator and Billie Joe threw their baby (either stillborn or aborted) off the bridge, and Billie Joe then killed himself out of grief and guilt. This version of events is accentuated in the Sinéad O'Connor version, where a baby is heard to cry at the moment the mystery item is thrown off the bridge. There was also speculation that Billie Joe was a black man, having a forbidden affair with the white narrator, although the culture of that area, in that time period, made it extremely unlikely that a black male would have had any part in the events described in the song's lyrics (a frog down the narrator's back at a public movie theater, socializing with the narrator's family after church, or being seen together throwing "something" off of a bridge in public).

Gentry continually dismissed the belief that the song was biographical. At the height of the song's popularity, numerous rumors circulated that Ms. Gentry had been questioned by Mississippi police.

The song's popularity proved so enduring that in 1976, nine years after its release, Warner Bros. commissioned author Herman Raucher to adapt it into a novel and screenplay, Ode to Billy Joe (note different spelling). The poster's tagline, which treats the film as being based on actual events and even gives a date of death for Billy (June 3, 1953), led many to believe that the song was based on actual events. In fact, when Raucher met Bobbie Gentry in preparation for writing the novel and screenplay, she confessed that she herself had no idea why Billie killed himself. In Raucher's novel and screenplay, Billy Joe kills himself after a drunken homosexual experience, and the object thrown from the bridge is the narrator's ragdoll.

Billy Joe's story is analyzed in Professor John Howard's history of gay Mississippi entitled Men Like That: A Queer Southern History as an archetype of what Howard calls the gay suicide myth.

***********
 
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I've crossed the Tallahatchie Bridge many times. A jump from that will more than likey get one stuck in the mud, not drowned. Like many rivers in northern Mississippi and Tennessee, one would only have to stand up and wade out.

I was watching some rafters in an inflatable raft on the Wolf River when one fell out. She stood up, only to find the water about waist deep.

Bob Wright
 
Back when they filmed the movie my partner and I worked a couple of night as watchmen over the movie equipment which was filming the bridge scene. I don't think the actual filming was on the Tallahatchie but some othe small river. I remember the old single lane iron bridge thus.

Good gig got paid $150 each a night, not bad for the mid- 70s. Wish I had bought a model 19 with the money back then
 
In Raucher's novel and screenplay, Billy Joe kills himself after a drunken homosexual experience, and the object thrown from the bridge is the narrator's ragdoll.
Click to expand...

Perhaps that is one of the reasons the song is so much more popular than the Movie? Where do homosexuals get the idea that the world revolves around their "sexuality"?
 
Perhaps that is one of the reasons the song is so much more popular than the Movie? Where do homosexuals get the idea that the world revolves around their "sexuality"?
Click to expand...

The other reason may be that the movie starred that insufferable geek Robbie Benson.
 
Thanks for that link Barb!
I think of that songs unique sound, every time spring turns into summer.
 
Wasn't that amazing? She just sat there and sang. Didn't jump around. Didn't swing on a rope. No laser light show. Just a woman with a lovely voice singing a song.

I miss that kind of thing.
 
Thanks for shedding a little more light on the story.

Now can someone please explain what happend "The night that the lights went out in Georgia"?
 
It makes me think of BCT-it was topping the
charts when I enlisted.
Mad Magazine parodied Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison albums by imagining albums by other singers at prisons, police stations, etc. I recall one was "Wayne Newton at the Christopher St Police Station". One of the "selections" was
"Ode to Bill and Joe"-maybe that's where the idea the song has some sort of homsexual them
to it comes from.
 
Originally posted by Farmer17:
Thanks for shedding a little more light on the story.

Now can someone please explain what happend "The night that the lights went out in Georgia"?
Click to expand...

Seriously?

Okay. A feller comes back from an out-of-town trip and stops off at the bar. A friend of his, Andy, tells him his wife has been cheatin' on him. This upsets him. Then Andy tells him that one of the guys she's been doin' it with is him (Andy).

Then Andy decides that telling the husband that he has been boppin' his wife wasn't a real bright thing to do, and went home.

The feller goes home, probably to beat the bejesus out of his wife, but she ain't there. So he gets his gun and goes to Andy's house, to kill Andy. Probably figgers she's there, too, and he can catch 'em in the act. While sneakin' up on Andy's house, he finds some small-size footprints.

When he gets to Andy's, he looks in and sees Andy layin' there "in a puddle of blood". Stupidly, he fires a shot in the air to attract the attention of the Po-lice. Cops show up. Open and shut case. Andy has been makin' the beast with two backs with this feller's wife. Andy has a bullet in him. Feller has a fresh-shot gun. They did a real quick kangaroo court and hanged him. Could be Andy was related to either the Sheriff or the Judge.

The narrator (and that's Vicki Lawrence. I love you, Reba, but you don't do this song worth a damn), who is the feller's sister, was gonna confess that SHE killed Andy (the small-size footprints were hers), for cuckolding her brother, but it was too late - he had already been hanged. And she goes on to say that she already killed the "cheating wife" and disposed of the body.
 
Originally posted by BLACKHAWKNJ:
It makes me think of BCT-it was topping the
charts when I enlisted.
Mad Magazine parodied Johnny Cash's Folsom Prison albums by imagining albums by other singers at prisons, police stations, etc. I recall one was "Wayne Newton at the Christopher St Police Station". One of the "selections" was
"Ode to Bill and Joe"-maybe that's where the idea the song has some sort of homsexual them
to it comes from.
Click to expand...

I remember that one. One of the albums was somebody (I think it was Englebert Humperdink) at somebody-or-other's "Home for the Criminally Insane", doing Christmas carols. One of them was, "Deck the Halls with Parts of Molly".
 
I remember that song.


I also remember looking for that woman.


I did NOT find her.
 
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