Like “Ode,” “Papa” mines the tension between appearances and reality. “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. “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. “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.” “ 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. 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. 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.ĭave 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. She vanished from the spotlight, and continues to turn down requests for interviews and invitations to perform.ĭespite her absence, Gentry’s influence still runs deep and keeps tracing new paths. 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. 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.
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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. 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. 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. It’s widely believed she painted the portraits used as the covers for her albums Fancy and Patchwork.
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Gentry was the first woman to host a variety show on the BBC (later, she hosted her own show on CBS). Producing a hit record was only the beginning of her pioneering career. “I left it open so the listener could draw his own conclusion.”Īs for the question of who Bobbie Gentry really is, she tried to tell us, but we wouldn’t listen to that answer, either.įor 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. She explained that the object thrown off the bridge was just a way to establish motivation for Billie Joe’s suicide.
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“This boy’s death did not get his neighbors involved,” she explained at the time.
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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. Fifty years later, neither question has been answered.