(This isn’t intended as a real blog post for classwork, but it’s something I’ve been dying to say for a while and it feels relevant enough to the course to post here. “Ode to Billie Joe” can be found at this link.)
“Ode to Billie Joe” by Bobbie Gentry is one of my favorite songs. Using the sevenths on all but one of the chords gives an interesting edge to a standard chord progression, Bobbie Gentry’s voice is spectacular, and the mysteries of who Billie Joe is and what he and our narrator threw off the bridge are irresistible, if you ignore the movie adaptation’s inane solution. It feels reductive, though, to focus on all of that while ignoring the merits of it as a work of first person fiction.
In the first verse, we are immediately shown a farm on the Mississippi delta. The nearly the whole family, including a daughter, are helping to get the harvest in. I don’t know how to fully explain this, but the music of it suggests relative poverty. When they go in for their meal, they’re reminded by “Mama” to wipe their feet. The entire stanza paints a mundane portrait of farming life, like Norman Rockwell covered in manure, until there’s a twist in the last two lines:
And then she said, “I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge;
Today, Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”
In spite of this, the sense of the ordinary perseveres throughout the next three verses. The narrator’s father explains the suicide as a lack of sense on Billie’s part, then immediately asks for more biscuits and discusses what’s left of work that day. Mama has a little more respect for the dead, calling the incident a “shame,” but seems to care little for the man himself. The narrator’s brother has grown up with Billie, and tells a story about him before talking about how he had just seen him the day before, stopping at one point to ask for more dessert. The narrator herself contributes nothing to the conversation. We learn in verse four that she also hasn’t been eating throughout the meal, and the last two lines of this stanza suggest a bond between her and Billie:
“He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
And she and Billie Joe was throwin’ somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge”
These lines are what people tend to focus on in their discussions of the song. Many interpret the relationship as a romantic one, and it’s often speculated that the family is unaware of it because they disapprove of him, whether that be because Papa says he “didn’t have a lick of sense,” or perhaps because it was an interracial relationship. (One can also read the line “That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today/Said he’d be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way” as the family trying to marry her off to him.) The next question tends to be what, exactly, they were throwing off the bridge. Some suggest a ring he’s given her, some suggest a body, whether that be the result of an accident or a well-hidden pregnancy. Some suggest simply flowers, a practice the narrator continues at the end of the song (spoilers), and that this was a way the two of them spent time together. (I asked my dad, and he thought it was a baby doll, as a symbol of childhood innocence.) It’s interesting to me that the narrator gives herself a moment of privacy here. We, the audience, don’t get to know exactly who Billie Joe was to her or what went over the bridge that day, because that isn’t a story she’s ready to tell.
The last verse flashes forward a year. Her brother’s gotten married and moved away, her father has died, and she’s still grieving for Billie. The last few lines, I believe, are particularly illuminating:
There was a virus going ’round; Papa caught it, and he died last spring
And now Mama doesn’t seem to want to 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
The entire song, the narrator has to suffer through her family not understanding the type of grief she’s experiencing but now, in the last verse, she turns around and shows that same indifference to her mother. This isn’t to say that she’s cruel or heartless, but that there’s something cyclical about it. Maybe she’s so wrapped up in her own sadness she doesn’t understand her mothers, or maybe she’s too angry about the way the family reacted to Billie Joe to be involved. After the last line, the string line is filled with descending sixteenth note chromatic runs, giving the sound of falling, lying the flowers, the familial relationships, and Billie Joe to rest.