Bobbie Gentry's Ode to Billie Joe 9781623569648, 9781623563424, 9781623562212, 1623569648

Citation preview

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http://www.bloomsbury.com/ musicandsoundstudies Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 1

27/10/2014 16:06

Forthcoming in the series: Live Through This by Anwyn Crawford Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Mike Foley Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann and many more …

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 2

27/10/2014 16:06

Ode to Billie Joe

Tara Murtha

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 3

27/10/2014 16:06

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 © Tara Murtha, 2015 Lyrics for “Ode to Billie Joe” used with permission from Northridge Music. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murtha, Tara. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe / Tara Murtha. pages cm. – (33 1/3) ISBN 978-1-62356-964-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Gentry, Bobbie. Ode to Billie Joe (Album) 2. Gentry, Bobbie. 3. Country musicians– United States–Biography. I. Title. ML420.G33M87 2015 782.421642092–dc23 2014027644 ISBN: PB: 978-1-6235-6964-8 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6342-4 ePub: 978-1-6235-6221-2 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk, NR21 8NN

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 4

27/10/2014 16:06

Track Listing

Side 1 1. “Mississippi Delta” (3:05) 2. “I Saw an Angel Die” (2:56) 3. “Chickasaw County Child” (2:45) 4. “Sunday Best” (2:50) 5. “Niki Hoeky” (2:45) Side 2 1. “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You” (2:30) 2. “Bugs” (2:05) 3. “Hurry, Tuesday Child” (4:52) 4. “Lazy Willie” (2:36) 5. “Ode to Billie Joe” (4:15)

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 5

27/10/2014 16:06

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 6

27/10/2014 16:06

Contents

Acknowledgments viii Foreword, by Jill Sobule xii 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Out of a Swamp Fog 1 Where is Bobbie Gentry? 10 The Bobbiebilia 19 Chickasaw County Child 25 Becoming Bobbie Gentry 36 “Produced by Kelly Gordon and Bobby Paris” 49 The Summer of “Ode to Billie Joe” 56 Capitol Pre-orders Five Times as Many Records as Meet the Beatles 71 9 The Capitol Years 88 10 Viva Las Vegas 93 11 What the Song Didn’t Tell You, the Movie Will 112 12 So I’m Packin’ Up and I’m Checking Out 124 Notes 129  vii •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 7

27/10/2014 16:06

Acknowledgments

Love to Jesse Lundy, for turning me on to the record and everything else, and mom and dad for the love and support. High fives to Bryan Holley and Jill Sobule for the trust and friendship. Heartfelt thank you to everyone who shared their memories or expertise, especially Jimmie Haskell, Ken Mansfield, Judith Paris, Sondra Currie, Max Baer, Jr., Don Bradburn, David Axelrod, Roger Douglas, Don Zimmerman, Herman Raucher, Francis Llacuna, Mike Deasy, L-P Anderson, Robin Mathis, Dick Boak, Neil Rushton, Brandy Herbert, Karl Ivanson, Bobby Craig, Frank Kejmar—and everyone else who passed my message along or talked to me off the record. And, of course, to Bobbie Gentry for the art and the adventure.

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 8

 viii •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Ode to Billy Joe, by Bobbie Gentry It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty, delta day, I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was bailin’ hay; And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat, And Mama hollered at the back door, “Y’all remember to wipe your feet.” Then she said, “I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge, Today Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge.” Papa said to Mama, as he passed around the black-eyed peas, “Well, Billy Joe never had a lick o’ sense, pass the biscuits, please, There’s five more acres in the lower forty I’ve got to plow,” And Mama said it was a shame about Billy Joe anyhow. Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge, And now Billy Joe McAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge. Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billy 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,  ix •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 9

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

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 Billy Joe’s jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge. Mama said to me, “Child what’s happened to your appetite? I been cookin’ all mornin’ 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 an’ Billy Joe was throwin’ somethin’ off the Tallahatchee Bridge.” A year has come and gone since we heard the news ’bout Billy Joe, Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo, There was a virus goin’ ’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 Tallahatchee Bridge. Lyrics printed with permission of Northridge Music  x •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 10

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Bobbie Gentry donated this early draft of “Ode to Billie Joe” to the University of Mississippi, where it is held in Special Collections alongside works by William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams  xi •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 11

27/10/2014 16:06

Foreword

September 10, 1967: Like every Sunday night, I beg my parents to let me stay up late past my 9 p.m. curfew to watch “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” I love that show. My favorite part is the musical guest. Sure they sometimes have squares like Jim Nabors, who always disappoints by not singing like Gomer Pyle, but they also book the bands too cool for American Bandstand. I read in the TV Guide (always well-prepped) that tonight’s guest is Bobbie Gentry.  I am not that excited as she’s supposed to be “country & western.” I don’t believe I like “country & western.” I am more … psychedelic rock. Well, little did I know that I was about to experience my own weird, child-sized psychedelic trip. Tommy Smothers introduces Bobbie. Then we  hear a lone guitar, followed by an almost sickly-sounding fall from the string section. And there is Bobbie, green sleeveless mini-dress, full-on Priscilla Presley hairdo, playing her parlor-sized guitar. I haven’t seen many women-guitarists, so right away I am all in. Behind Gentry, three expressionless white mannequins sit at an old dining table under a Victorian stained-glass hanging lamp.  xii •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 12

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

It’s completely creepy. Bobbie’s delivery is, of course, soulful but also incredibly matter-of-fact. In that era, singers, especially female singers, usually smiled, even when performing a terribly depressing number.  But this Bobbie doesn’t let up. The desolate mood is unbroken. At the end of the song, she pays us no attention, puts down the guitar, and walks back to the dining table to sit in the empty chair. She seems doomed to live forever with that dreadful mannequin family. After the show, I don’t want to spend the night in my bedroom all by myself. It isn’t the normal monster under the bed. Nor do I fear the spooky mannequins coming into my room. I just feel alone. I haven’t a clue what the story or lyrics of the song are about, yet I know it contains something really sad and unable to bust out. And that makes it, and me, even sadder. Bobbie’s performance brought on my first existential crisis. Her Southern Gothic “pass the black-eyed peas” mannequin family was probably very different from mine—middle-class, secular Jews from Denver, Colorado—but there was a kind of disconnect at our dining table as well.  Something unspoken, hidden. Secrets. Maybe terrible secrets. A few decades later:  I have just bought a turntable, and little by little I am building my record collection. At Amoeba in Hollywood I stumble upon … a stash of used Bobbie Gentry LPs. I buy four on the spot, including Ode to Billie Joe. As soon as I drop the needle, I am six years old again, having feelings that no kid should have. However, after my fiftieth consecutive listen, my focus •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 13

 xiii •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

shifts to the mystery within the lyrics. What the hell was thrown off that bridge? What happened, and why? Soon after, I become obsessed with a bigger, realworld mystery: Where is Bobbie Gentry? Bobbie Gentry hasn’t appeared in public since the early 1980s. In our being-famous-for-being-famous society, the idea that a bona fide star would purposely vanish from the limelight seems crazy, impossible. There’s got to be something fishy: a scandal, a bad drug problem, severe mental illness. Worse? There are many theories on her disappearance, just as numerous as there are interpretations of Ode’s lyrics. But they’re mainly focused on where she has retired. There is no whispering of rehab, rare disease, murder, or anything. No conspiracy theory. In 2009, I wrote a song called “Where is Bobbie Gentry?” For the hell of it, I asked my friends at ASCAP if they knew how to get ahold of Gentry. (I assumed that if anyone knew where she lived, they surely would, as they mail the royalty checks.) I had this fantasy that, after hearing my demo, she’d go into the studio for the first time in 30 years to sing it with me. I knew my chances were pretty slim. I wrote her a note, just in case. Dear Miss Gentry, I just wanted to tell you how much of an inspiration you have been to me. I knew  that I wanted to write songs and play guitar after I first saw you on TV at a very early age. You told me that girls could do it too.

 xiv •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 14

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

I went on like that for a couple more gushing paragraphs, and closed by begging her to sing on my record. I did not tell her that I had a huge crush on her at the age of seven and that that might have been a sign of things to come. Nor that after I saw her with those spooky-ass mannequins, I slept in my parents’ room for an entire week. I am still waiting for her response. Jill Sobule, April, 2014

 xv •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 15

27/10/2014 16:06

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 16

27/10/2014 16:06

1

Out of a Swamp Fog

The Desert Inn, Las Vegas, 1974 It’s seven years after the smash hit record Ode to Billie Joe topped the charts and three years since the release of Patchwork, Bobbie Gentry’s last album for Capitol Records. Tonight, Gentry is performing her stage show in the Crystal Ballroom at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas. The lights dim. Ribbons of thick blue smoke billow across the stage, blurring the floor. A gondola emerges from a split in the back curtain, then swiftly skims out onto the stage. At the front of the boat, Bobbie Gentry is posed regally, one leg hiked high on the bow, a sexy pirate scanning the horizon. She wears a tight frilly top tied into a knot above her bare midriff, and a ruffled crochet skirt split clear up to her hip. Standing behind her in the boat, a small shadowy figure dips an oar down into the fog, pretending to row as Gentry sails toward the spotlight.  1 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 1

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

The opening number is “He Made a Woman Out of Me,” a saucy and soulful barnburner off Fancy, Gentry’s 1970 Muscle Shoals record. It’s a song about a teenage girl in Louisiana who is deflowered by the rough-butmost-welcome hands of a man named Joe Henry James. She steps out of the boat and begins to sing about “the heck of a job” Joe has done. “I’ve been set free,” she sings. Gentry struts across the stage, swinging her hips in time to crashing cymbals, bang bang bang bang. Behind her, two lithe male dancers twirl and boogie like the business. They dive forward into handstands, smack their heels together, then leap back onto their feet. The song fades out, and Gentry welcomes the audience to tonight’s show, inviting them to come along “to the land of dreams, with the Cajun Queen.” The Cajun Queen is one of Bobbie’s nicknames, even though she was born in Mississippi and came of age in California, a fact strategically left out of the rags-to-riches, farm-to-fame, choose-your-ownalliterative-shorthand-for-the-American-dream pin-up persona born when “Ode to Billie Joe” was released in 1967. She has also been called the Delta Queen and Chickasaw County Child, which at least reflect the two distinct areas of Mississippi where she split her childhood. It doesn’t matter, though, that the three monikers represent three different areas of the South— they all get across the exotic allure of the Bobbie Gentry brand, which, for better and worse, is Southern. Thirty-two years old now, Gentry barely resembles the 25-year-old girl on the cover of her 1967 debut album Ode to Billie Joe. In the famous cover image,  2 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 2

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Gentry sits on a fence in a white t-shirt and blue jeans cradling a small acoustic Martin parlor guitar. The back of the LP features a black-and-white photo of Gentry walking barefoot in the woods, smiling at the camera, guitar slung over her shoulder. Since “Ode to Billie Joe” was released in the summer of 1967 as a single without any accompanying photography, many fans had no idea what Gentry looked like until the full album was released weeks later. Station program directors didn’t know what she looked like either, which complicated their job of categorizing Gentry’s sound. Historically, businessmen and program directors in the American music business relied on an artist’s skin color to determine how to market the records. To oversimplify it, Southern-themed music made by black artists was called the “blues,” and white artists played “country.” Without Gentry’s skin color as a guide, “Ode to Billie Joe” was embraced as pop, country, folk, folk-rock, easy listening, R&B, and soul. Though most often remembered as a country singer who crossed into pop, Gentry thought of herself as a pop composer who wrote about country things. At least, initially. To borrow her preferred euphemism, Gentry wrote fewer “regional” songs as she progressed through her songwriting career. Though she did indeed write many songs about life in the South, in reality, her catalogue also brims with explorations of Hollywood, illusion, and life in show business—regional tunes of another sort. Ultimately, whether singing about life in the South or Southern California, the unifying theme of Gentry’s work is “the kind charade,” as she put it in  3 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 3

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“Lookin’ In,” the last song on her last album for Capitol Records. The kind charade is the same whether it’s Southern manners acted out around a dinner table (“pass the biscuits, please”) in Mississippi, or phony show-biz talk in L.A. In “Lookin’ In,” her farewell to both the business and the trappings of her “Ode to Billie Joe” persona, she sings, “Don’t want to meet myself at the masquerade.” Gentry is, at heart, a storyteller. Though occasionally confessional, more often than not she mines the themes of identity and illusion by inventing characters, then dutifully documenting their paradoxical quests for intimacy and freedom. She describes their plights with an observational detachment that reinforces the point she initially made with “Ode to Billie Joe”: Freedom and intimacy are as elusive as the desire for them is unrelenting. This is the struggle. The unnamed narrator in “Ode to Billie Joe” sings from the point of view of a young girl whose family doesn’t recognize how she feels about the news that Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge*, and the apathy runs around the table both ways: A year later, when Papa dies from that virus going around, the young girl can’t connect with her mother’s grief, either. Gentry’s idea of freedom doesn’t reflect the hippie ideal of her era. She made no bones about the fact that for her, freedom begins with financial independence. “Fancy,” Gentry’s second-biggest hit, is a teenager whose mother teaches her how to pimp herself out to men *  Gentry’s original lyric spells it “Tallahatchee,” though the popular and colloquial spelling is “Tallahatchie.”

 4 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 4

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

for money. She defiantly refuses to be ashamed about doing what she had to do to survive. On Patchwork, “Beverly” works all day at the factory, quietly crying while dreaming of the girl she used to be when she danced in ballrooms. “Belinda” is a small-town burlesque queen making forty bucks a week dancing for whistling cowboys. She comforts herself that though the leering men may know her body, they cannot know her mind. Then she laughs, and starts her next show. “It’s so nice to see all of you here tonight,” Gentry says, projecting her signature breathy drawl like a well-trained pageant contestant. “Most of you here in the audience know that I’m from the South … I’m from Chickasaw County, Mississippi.” Pause. “What most people don’t realize,” she says, “is that I left there when I was very young.” She stops and composes her face in deep thought, as if she’s wondering how to delicately phrase what she is about to say. In fact, she’s been giving this speech almost verbatim on stage, on television, during interviews, for years. “Maybe people have the impression that … I just sort of, arose out of a swamp fog and appeared on television.” The audience laughs. “Actually, I’ve been in California since I was 13.” Then quickly: “But I do get back to Mississippi.” Almost 50 years after Gentry recorded the mysterious ballad “Ode to Billie Joe,” it remains the touchstone of her career, a looking glass that cuts both ways: The wild commercial success of “Ode” transformed Gentry from an unknown working musician to an international star. But it also set a commercial precedent almost impossible to repeat, and ultimately served to obscure a larger, richer body of work—and caged the artist into  5 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 5

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

a persona she spent the rest of her career trying to transcend. Bobbie Gentry was one of the first female musicians to write, perform, and produce her own material. Most female performers of the era were interpreters, but Bobbie had something to say. Hailed as a classic example of Southern Gothic literature, her original lyrics to “Ode to Billie Joe” and related papers are held at the University of Mississippi, alongside works by Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner. In 1968, at a time when American TV execs didn’t believe a female host could attract advertisers, Gentry became the first woman to host her own variety show on the BBC. She DJed a popular radio program on Armed Forces Radio that aired all over the world. She held her own on the business end, too. Within months of scoring a hit with “Ode to Billie Joe,” Gentry established two publishing companies, Super Darlin’ Productions (ASCAP) and Footboat (BMI), and organized them beneath her parent production company Gentry Ltd.1 After she left Capitol Records to focus on stage productions in Las Vegas, Gentry broke showroom attendance records and personally negotiated unprecedented multi-million-dollar paychecks. In 1976, she became the first woman inducted into the Mississippi Hall of Fame. The down-home persona created by “Ode to Billie Joe” wasn’t fake, exactly—but it reflected only one facet of a far more complicated life and identity. She created the myth that took on a life of its own, as one friend put it. No moment in Bobbie Gentry’s roughly 13 years in show business encapsulates this paradox as succinctly as this  6 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 6

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

one, when she literally emerges out of a fake swamp fog, then politely explains to the audience that she did not emerge out of a swamp fog. It’s almost time for the big number. Gentry has just finished telling the audience about her California childhood, when the dancers glide back on stage, hoist her into the air and gently place her on a stool. Then woosh, they are gone again. Gentry knows the audience needs to hear “Ode to Billie Joe,” but she doesn’t hold them captive and sing it as a finale or encore like most artists with big hits do. Instead, Gentry plays “Ode” right near the top of the show. It’s another accommodation of the sort she has routinely made throughout her career, twisting to catch the light between art and commerce, balancing the audience’s need to see her perform “Ode to Billie Joe” with her artistic—and personal—desire to express her identity as a pop composer and multi-faceted entertainer. “A lot of people ask me, is that ‘Billie Joe’ a true story? And of course, all of the places that I mention in the song are authentic … now I don’t know if any of you remember reading about this or not, but this was out in the papers a couple of summers ago. I was working at the Harrah’s club in Reno … and when I got back there was a message waiting, that the Associated Press was trying to reach me all day … and I called them back and it turns out, that after 150 years, the old Tallahatchie Bridge had finally just collapsed … down in the river … When I heard the news I really felt kind of sad about it, you know, it was such a landmark, that old bridge had been there as long as I can remember. And of course I remember very well it was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty, delta day …”  7 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 7

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

The authenticity paradox that stretches the arc of Gentry’s career has been collapsed down into this five minutes on stage: No, “Ode to Billie Joe” is not a true story, but yes, it’s based on “authentic” places that she “remembers very well.” The spotlight tightens into a bright halo as Bobbie Gentry sings the last verse of “Ode to Billie Joe.” The music fades, and Bobbie gazes at the floor, then dramatically drops her head like a doll whose batteries have run out of power. The stage goes black. Now, the rest of the show can begin. The back curtains swish open and light floods the stage. Gentry sprints toward the audience in an outrageously tight gold glitter bodysuit that shows off what one reviewer memorably referred to as her “anatomical forté.” Six buff, shirtless male dancers in matching hip-hugger gold glitter bell-bottoms rush on stage behind her, kicking their legs toward the Vegas paper moon. They spend a few seconds thrusting their hips like jackhammers before prancing off stage again, leaving Gentry to dance alone in the light. The show goes on like this all night, all year, for many years. The songs, sets, and costumes change, of course, but it’s always the same: Gentry is surrounded by people, and then alone, surrounded, then alone. A self-declared workaholic, Gentry is always planning the next performance, the next show, the next phase of her career. She loves show business, she has said, because everything you do can be an extension, or dimension, of something else. Songs are enhanced on stage by choreography and dance. Characters come to life in costumes she can design.  8 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 8

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Stage shows can be adapted for television cameras. Lyrics can be translated into screenplays. Album covers can be painted portraits.2 It’s 1974. Gentry is already done, for the most part, with the record business. For years now, she’s been traveling all over the world, performing exhausting, non-stop high-energy shows. She dreams of hosting her own television show in the States. She wants to translate “Ode to Billie Joe” for the big screen. Gentry always said she only wanted to perform as long as it didn’t take too much time away from writing and composing. Initially, she wanted to sell her songs for other people to record. She only sang on the demo that landed her a contract with Capitol Records because it was cheaper than hiring a professional,3 and when Capitol producers heard her voice—and got a load of her beauty—they wanted her to be the star, not just the writer. Ultimately, she wants to direct and produce film and television. Bobbie Gentry is always thinking about the future. But right this moment, she is on stage, and that is exactly where she wants to be. With all eyes on her, Bobbie begins her signature hip-swiveling dance, a move dubbed “the Gentry strut” by theater critics. She swings to the left, displaying her glittering silhouette to the adoring audience. She swings to the right. She stretches her arms out into the air and begins twirling around and around, her gold glitter bodysuit shattering the spotlight into countless tiny prisms.

 9 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 9

27/10/2014 16:06

2

Where is Bobbie Gentry?

Bobbie Gentry’s show business career ended six or so years after that performance at the Desert Inn. In 1979, she had a son, then returned to the stage for one or two more show runs. Though it was sometime in the early 1980s, no one seems to know the date of her last official performance. There was no send-off show, or grand goodbye. She didn’t announce retirement. It’s possible she didn’t even plan it; she just quietly turned down invitations to perform or appear, and then years passed. Acquaintances that spent time with Gentry back then don’t have a sense of a line in the sand, of a “before” or “after” what we now, in retrospect, think of as her disappearance. In fact, as Bobbie Gentry turned 40 years old in 1982, it seemed to colleagues that she was preparing for the next chapter in what had so far been a fast-paced, diverse, and rewarding professional life. Sources say she co-wrote a screenplay for “Fancy,” the big hit off the album of the same name produced by Rick Hall at Muscle Shoals (that •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 10

 10 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

is, tragically, sometimes thought of as a Reba McEntire tune ever since she had a hit with it in 1991). At one time, industry trade mags reported that Gentry was negotiating to purchase the screenplay for The Divine Sarah, a film about legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt. She had written a script for a children’s Christmas musical and recorded a demo of the soundtrack. A batch of songs she recorded for Warner Brothers in the late 1970s were never released as an album. Instead, a few landed scattered across compilations. In 1982, a short newspaper piece on former teen idol Bobby Sherman mentioned that he was producing a Bobbie Gentry record.1 In 1984, she told family she was recording songs in her home studio in California. She got so far into plans to open a theater in Branson, Missouri, a friend told me, that she commissioned an architect to sketch design plans. If any of these projects ever happened, the world doesn’t know about it. In 1978, Bobbie Gentry made her last major television appearance as a guest on The Tonight Show, where she had made her network debut 11 years earlier. It was Christmas night, and Johnny wasn’t even there. He was on holiday.2 She hasn’t spoken to the press, either. With nothing to promote, why bother? Gentry was never one to talk much about her personal life to reporters, who, with some notable exceptions, wrote paternalistic profiles of her that recycled old, often blatantly sexist, tropes. The first wave of profiles in the wake of “Ode to Billie Joe” either made her out to be the missing Beverly Hillbilly or condescendingly expressed shock that she wasn’t. “Top Composer-Singer Not the Hillbilly Type,” announced one headline. Another stated: “Twenty-three year old Bobbie Gentry is anything •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 11

 11 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

but the hillbilly folk singer you might expect. If she didn’t have a Miss America type figure (37-23-37) you might call her an intellectual.” Some of the sexist coverage of Gentry was more subtle. A 1969 piece in the Los Angeles Times by Wayne Warga is an insightful example of the way many male reporters wrote about Gentry. After describing her as “a deep dish Southern pie” and remarking that “one can’t help liking this gracious, leggy girl,” Warga opined, “It’s almost as if success caught her unprepared. ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ came on overnight in July, 1967. She won three Grammys and so far has sold 1.7 million copies. But what then? How best to deal with fame?”3 Warga ended the piece by comparing Gentry to one of her yapping dogs. When given a chance to speak for herself, Gentry didn’t waste energy playing the peculiar feminine parlor game of downplaying her work and feigning that sheer luck was the reason for her success. “I started my singing career when I was very young,” Gentry told reporter Lydia Lane, also of the Los Angeles Times. “And I always knew that one day I would make it. When it came, I had no time for having my head turned.”4 Though most articles on Bobbie Gentry published since she went silent don’t indulge in the sexism of her era, they do tend to recycle a handful of factual errors and myths. All in all, her refusal to talk to reporters isn’t so surprising. Given a thriving tabloid press and the continued interest in Gentry’s life and career—no doubt bolstered by the mystique of her silence—the real shock is that she has somehow managed to stay out of sight. When Gentry stepped off stage, she simultaneously slipped out of the lives of many friends and even family •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 12

 12 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

members who long to talk with her. I discovered this calling old colleagues, who often had more questions for me than I had for them: Have you talked to her? How is she doing? Where is she? Please, please tell her I said hello. This is what I know: Over the years, Gentry has moved all over the country. Now in her early seventies, she lives a private life on a rolling estate. She apparently has little interest in returning to the public eye, and has no financial need to. Gentry is a savvy businesswoman, and has been from the very beginning of her career. In 1968, she invested $50,000 of her “Ode” earnings in the Phoenix Suns basketball team with the likes of Henry Mancini and Andy Williams. She used “Ode” money to set up her own production and publishing companies. During the frenzy of her initial fame, while “Ode to Billie Joe” was the number one song in America, she refused to sign a management contract for any longer than six months, in order to give herself time to negotiate a better deal. If, unlike her characters, Bobbie Gentry was able to find both freedom and intimacy, she has only been able to do so while living a private life. And yet. Some evidence, glimmers really, suggests that Bobbie Gentry is not completely committed to show-biz exile. One music industry honcho I spoke with swore that he almost convinced her to perform a show in the mid-1990s. Jimmie Haskell, the extraordinarily talented composer who arranged the strings on Ode to Billie Joe and other Gentry albums, says she called him up out of the blue in the late 1990s to talk about making another record. His immediate schedule was booked, and she never called back. An academic researcher told me that he chatted with Gentry a few times to arrange an •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 13

 13 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

interview before she stopped returning his calls. While reporting this book, I heard many stories with a similar pattern—Gentry would almost yes to an interview or performance, but then change her mind. Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of a renaissance of mainstream interest in Bobbie Gentry. In 2003, veteran music journalist Holly George-Warren wrote a splashy piece in MOJO magazine introducing Gentry to a new generation as “the J. D. Salinger of rock ’n’ roll.”5 Around that time, boutique Australian label Raven Records began re-issuing Gentry’s catalogue, which had been largely unavailable in digital formats. In 2012, Rosanne Cash produced the BBC Radio 2 audio documentary Whatever Happened to Bobbie Gentry? Cash is a longtime outspoken fan; she’s been covering “Ode to Billie Joe” in her live set for years. Lucinda Williams, Beth Orton, and of course Jill Sobule have all written songs about Gentry and spoken publicly about her profound influence on their work, and music in general. Admirers such as Sheryl Crow and k.d. lang have called on Jimmie Haskell specifically to request that he infuse their work with an “Ode to Billie Joe” sound. In 2006, while promoting Rabbit Fur Coat, Jenny Lewis explained her switch from acting to songwriting by saying, “This has more to do with Bobbie Gentry.”6 Gentry’s influence on the modern musical landscape extends beyond female artists blurring the boundaries of pop, country, and rock: The drum break in Lou Donaldson’s bluesy jazz cover of “Ode to Billie Joe” is one of the most sampled in hip-hop. Originally released on the 1967 album Mr. Shing-a-Ling, Donaldson’s drumbeat pulses through songs like “Jesus Walks” (2004) by Kanye •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 14

 14 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

West,7 “Clap Your Hands” (1993) by A Tribe Called Quest, and “Old to the New” (1994) by Nice & Smooth. Some people who knew Bobbie Gentry aren’t totally surprised by her disappearance from the world’s stage. She was always loyal to those who treated her in kind and notably generous to employees, but she could also be guarded. She could be secretive. They recall an intense woman who was almost ruthlessly logical and grounded and yet somehow seemed always on the verge of fading away, whether into the next big project or romance. “I just realized part of her pattern was disappearing through various times,” as one friend put it. “And I had to respect that.” But still. She had always come back. In 2013, Gentry was honored with a marker on the Mississippi Country Music Trail. Event organizers and fans hoped Gentry would appear in person to accept the honor. She didn’t. Would fans recognize her if she did? Gentry wouldn’t be the first female star to choose to be remembered as she looked back in her heyday rather than have her face pasted beneath an insulting banner on a tabloid website for having the audacity to outlive youth. We live in a culture that often treats beautiful women who dare to age with breathtaking cruelty. She doesn’t need the money, internet culture is hostile, and the press is at least partially responsible for hemming her into an identity she wanted to transcend. Yet, I hoped she would make an exception for me, of course. Given what I discovered while researching this book, I thought she may be interested in finally setting the •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 15

 15 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

record straight about the production of “Ode to Billie Joe.” It turns out, the deepest mystery ensnared in “Ode to Billie Joe” isn’t what object was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, or even why Billie Joe jumped. In 1974, a writer challenged Gentry’s identity as a feminist for the same reason female pop stars are still questioned today—because she wore fake eyelashes, vampy clothes, and played her femininity “to the hilt.” Gentry refused to take the bait, but her answer revealed a glimpse of the bigger mystery hidden within “Ode to Billie Joe.” “I am a woman working for herself in a man’s field. After all, I am a successful woman record-producer. Did you know that I took ‘Ode to Billy Jo[sic]’ to Capitol, sold it, and produced the album myself? It wasn’t easy,” Gentry responded. “It’s difficult when a woman is attractive; beauty is supposed to negate intelligence—which is ridiculous. Certainly there are no women executives and producers to speak of in the record business.”8 Like Jill Sobule, and god knows how many other people, I wrote Bobbie Gentry a letter. I tucked it inside a Christmas card. Please help me get this right, I wrote. Could you kindly answer a few questions? She declined, of course, though very graciously. Our intermediary assured me that Bobbie enjoyed reading my letters, and contemplated the offer—but her interest in maintaining privacy won out. I was disappointed but not surprised. She’s rejected requests from celebrities and high-profile music writers for decades. For a while, I was happy just that I •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 16

 16 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

managed to reach her. She liked my letters! I comforted myself with the thought: She almost said yes! As days passed, images of all of the people who had excitedly told me the same thing—she almost said yes!—whirled around my head like the pivotal scene in a bad movie. Then I thought about “Ode to Billie Joe.” At its core, it’s a comment on how social graces can be wielded like a weapon, imitating intimacy while enforcing solitude. I realized that Bobbie Gentry didn’t almost say yes to any of us. The woman just knows how to say no. Some stories go around in circles. Memories fade, fracture, and conflict. Just the other day, I called Don Randi, legendary keyboard player and member of the Wrecking Crew, the term for a loose group of session players who played on almost all popular music recorded in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Randi’s playing is stamped all over the era, including on “These Boots are Made for Walkin’ ” and other Nancy Sinatra tracks. I called him because another Wrecking Crew member who worked with Gentry on “Ode” remembered seeing Randi at a key recording session. When I asked Randi about “Ode to Billie Joe,” he started laughing. “Did I play on that one?” he asked. “I don’t remember if I was on that or not. I don’t think I was. But you never know!” Where stories conflict, I attribute. I made some judgment calls using insight gleaned from research and conversations with sources. About finding primary sources: Ode to Billie Joe was created almost half a century ago. Many people I would’ve liked to interview have died. Some have been gone for decades. Others I •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 17

 17 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

missed by months. I missed one guy by a day. It speaks to Gentry’s character that most of the people I spoke with— from old colleagues to musicians who just did a one-off gig with her—were very protective. Many inquiries went unanswered. One guy, after assuming I was working for Bobbie rather than simply writing about her career, threatened to sue me if I so much as breathed his name in this book—even though the only thing he told me was that she was wonderful and talented. Some old-timers just slammed the door: No. A few theatrically elaborate responses betrayed claims of ignorance, like the big-time publicist who answered a simple interview request with a long explanation of how no one has seen or heard from her for years and years and years and I couldn’t possibly be any help to you and no one ever heard from her ever ever ever again. Some of the kind souls who did speak with me did so reluctantly, just to sort of feel me out while trying to make sure that I understood: Bobbie Gentry was a loyal friend, a remarkable businesswoman, and a talented multi-instrumentalist artist. She was ahead of her time in a male-dominated industry in an era when sex appeal helped move product, but could also be a liability for a woman who wanted to conduct her own business. Women wanted me to know that she went out of her way to help other women come up in the industry. And while no one seemed totally shocked by their friend’s radical departure out of the limelight, many seemed quite surprised, still, to find themselves on the outside of her inner circle.

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 18

 18 •

27/10/2014 16:06

3

The Bobbiebilia

I’m standing in an attic in a house in Southern Oregon, and I’ve just been handed a fur coat that belonged— belongs?—to Bobbie Gentry. It’s dark brown fur, a petite cut, and sort of a swing style. It looks brand new. Inside, “Gentry Ltd.” is stitched in elaborate script into silk lining the color of richly creamed coffee. Holding it feels surreal, and a bit creepy. But I want to try it on. “Try it on!” Bryan Holley smiles as he stands in front of the closet where he stores the coat. Holley’s father, the late Ocie Leonard Holley, was married to Bobbie Gentry’s mother Ruby. He recalls the moment his father told him that he was marrying Bobbie Gentry’s mother. “By the time that this happened, I’d already grown up knowing about Bobbie Gentry, just as an American citizen because of the song ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’ ” says Holley. “Papa was a little bit shy, then finally he told me that [Ruby] was Bobbie Gentry’s mama.” Technically, Holley is Bobbie Gentry’s step-brother, but they’ve only met in person once. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 19

 19 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Holley needs it to be clear: Bobbie Gentry’s coat wound up in his closet by happenstance, and he would love nothing more than to give it back. He never sought to own the coat or the rest of the stash he playfully calls “the Bobbiebilia.” In fact, the Bobbiebilia has been a bit of a burden. Holley’s wife Nancy is a cool, relaxed woman with a no-nonsense grace. The Bobbiebilia makes her eyes roll. She’d prefer if her husband would just throw that stuff out already. But Holley can’t bring himself to do that. He’s a fair man who wants to return the stuff to its rightful owner. Holley inherited the fur coat, and the boxes of Bobbiebilia, after his father died in 2008. When he put the boxes in his basement, he didn’t realize he was storing pieces of one of the biggest pop music puzzles of the century. He didn’t know that the mystery of Bobbie Gentry had grown larger than the one presented in the lyrics of “Ode to Billie Joe.” He hadn’t yet seen the tribute websites, where fans and people claiming to be distant family members regularly swap details and exchange theories about where Gentry lives or what she’s doing. He didn’t know that Gentry was now “the J. D. Salinger of rock and roll.” He just thought that he couldn’t get in touch with her. Holley sent a letter to her last known address in Los Angeles, but the correspondence went unacknowledged. “At one point, Daddy told me she had moved to Savannah, Georgia,” says Holley. But he couldn’t find an address for her there, either. So he just put the boxes away. “I didn’t know she retired from public life,” says Holley. “And I really never wondered about it too much.” That all changed after Holley heard Jill Sobule’s “Where is Bobbie Gentry?” on the radio. “I’m sitting in •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 20

 20 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

my house [listening to the radio] … and I hear this riff,” says Holley. Sobule’s guitar work is reminiscent of “Ode,” and it made his ears perk up. “I’m following it and then I hear this chorus, ‘Where is Bobbie Gentry?’ And I went, ‘WHAT? What is this?’ ” After Holley heard “Where is Bobbie Gentry?” on the radio, he looked up Sobule’s website and sent her an email. He was hoping that maybe Jill, being a musician, could figure out a way to get in touch with Bobbie so he could return her things. Sobule wrote him back, and he told her about the Bobbiebilia. As fate would have it, Jill had a show scheduled at a club in Oregon near Bryan’s house, and they arranged to meet. “So I got to be Jill Sobule’s roadie for one day,” laughs Holley. “In exchange, she showed me the chords to ‘Where is Bobbie Gentry?,’ and we played it together and sang it together.” As her song goes, though, Jill doesn’t know where Bobbie Gentry is, and she told Holley as much. A short while after that, he got a call from me. I met Bryan Holley by reporter-stalking him, basically. In 2010, Holley granted permission for Southern California radio station 89.3KPCC to post never-beforeseen video clips from his collection on their website. In the jumpy, faded footage, Bobbie’s hanging out in short shorts, puffing on a cigarette and waving at the camera as she rides a bicycle in the desert. She’s with an unidentified man with a pretty serious pair of striped bell-bottom pants and Sonny Bono hair. The film cuts to Bobbie’s mother Ruby tending to a rose bush, then Bobbie and Ruby whacking golf balls into the desert. The second video clip is from Christmas, 1971. Gentry •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 21

 21 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

and family members huddle near a Christmas tree and unwrap presents as Billie Joe and Fancy, Bobbie’s little Yorkshire Terriers, sniff around for treats. I watched the videos, found Holley’s contact information, and sent him a note. I learned a little bit about the Bobbiebilia when we spoke on the telephone, and then we talked several times over the course of a couple of years. Eventually, we arranged for me to fly out and meet him. When I stepped off the plane in Oregon and spotted a guy with a huge mustache and even bigger smile, I knew it was the man I spoke to on the phone. We hopped in his pick-up truck and headed north into a wide-open beautiful November day. To our left, the blue sky sank into the jagged tips of the gold and red trees covering the floor of Bear Creek Valley. The Holley home is woody and warm. Paper lanterns and glass ornaments dangle from hooks nailed into the ceiling. A piano sits across from a vintage parlor couch. Bryan and Nancy are musicians, and instruments are everywhere. I spot a parlor-sized Martin that’s the same size and shape as Gentry’s signature guitar, but with a darker brown top. “That one belonged to Ruby,” he tells me. Ruby, also a musician, gave Bryan a guitar and ukulele as gifts, and Bryan’s since become a bit of a uke nut. He studies the instrument’s history and has recorded an album. Next to the piano, Holley has set up a folding table for us to sit and review the Bobbiebilia. All in all, the collection consists of seven or eight clear plastic shoeboxes-worth of papers, notes, photographs, fan club letters, records, and assorted ephemera. It’s mostly memorabilia from the very early years of Gentry’s career, including the decade or so she toiled before becoming a so-called overnight •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 22

 22 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

sensation with “Ode to Billie Joe.” It also contains a few personal items, like the old-fashioned picture frame with Bobbie’s bronzed baby shoes glued to the base. I spot a thick libretto bound in green leather. Christmas Picturebook: A Musical Fantasy is embossed on the cover in gold. Christmas Picturebook is a fully developed script, a children’s story that tells the story of elves who toil behind the scenes to create Christmas magic. A minirecord, a master recording stamped Gentry Ltd., is also in the box—a demo recorded to go along with the Christmas script. We slip it out of its sleeve and give it a spin on Holley’s record player: “Ding a ling, ding a ling, Christmas comes but once a year but we work the whole year through, for you and you and you!” We listen to a deep, booming Santa voice singing to elves, who have tiny tinny voices sped up and warped, like Alvin and the Chipmunks. I find another record in the box, a Capitol Records test pressing dated January 15, 1968. It’s the original demo of Gentry singing “La Città è Grande” and “La Siepe,” the songs she entered in the 1968 San Remo Music Festival competition. Gentry could sing in both Italian and Spanish. In a clipping dated March 10, 1960, a 17-year-old Bobbie Gentry—billed as Bobbie Meyers—was photographed in a field of wildflowers for a feature in a Palm Springs newspaper. I spot a handwritten invitation to her 1978 wedding to Jim Stafford, the country singer known for “Spiders & Snakes.” Inside an envelope is a note from Bobbie to her mother Ruby, telling her that she just met Paul McCartney. I spent a weekend with the Holleys, going through the boxes, listening to stories, drinking wine, and strumming •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 23

 23 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

guitars. I was about to leave when Bryan remembered that he wanted to show me the fur coat, which he stores carefully in a plastic protective garment bag in a closet next to his daughter’s bedroom. Sometimes the line between being a journalist and plain old creepy is thin as skin. Gentry is entitled to privacy, but the collateral damage is an erasure of her pioneering accomplishments. The fact is that Bobbie Gentry is a multi-instrumentalist pop composer and producer sometimes dismissed as a one-hit country wonder. We don’t need to take Gentry’s word for it. There’s plenty of evidence that she in part produced Ode to Billie Joe. She may not care anymore, but other people do. It matters. I slip the coat over my shoulders. I think of all the people and beautiful things Bobbie Gentry left behind when she left show business. Maybe, “Where is Bobbie Gentry?” is the wrong question. A better one might be, Who was Bobbie Gentry? I slide my hand into the coat pocket and feel a coin. I take it out and have a look. It’s from the year 1970. I head home with the Bobbiebilia, and start at the beginning.

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 24

 24 •

27/10/2014 16:06

4

Chickasaw County Child

Bobbie Gentry was born Roberta Lee Streeter in Mississippi on July 27, 1942. Most of her biographies claim she was born in 1944, but that’s in Capitol years. The suits routinely shaved a few years off artists’ ages for sex appeal’s sake, whether or not they needed any help in that department. With her dark luminous eyes, chiseled cheekbones, and dancer’s physique, Gentry did not. The first six years of Bobbie’s life were spent on a farm a few miles outside of Woodland, a tiny village in Chickasaw County in Northeast Mississippi. She has said there were no other children around during these years. Gentry lived on a farm with her paternal grandparents, native Mississippians Harvey Bell and Maude Streeter.1 Even though Bobbie only resided in Chickasaw County her toddling and pre-school years, this is the facet of her life that was marketed by Capitol and embraced by the press when “Ode to Billie Joe” catapulted her into the spotlight in the summer of 1967. The same details were repeated in story after story: The farm had no electricity. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 25

 25 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

As a little girl, Gentry hosted tea parties in the dirt under the big old oak tree in the front yard, scratching at chiggers while passing teacups to imaginary friends. Little Bobbie took a shine to music early, and would press her ear to an old transistor radio to listen to jazz and blues piped in from New Orleans stations. When she expressed an interest in music, her grandparents traded a cow for an old upright piano. She taught herself how to play that piano by watching old Ginny Sue, who only pushed down the black keys while playing organ at the Pleasant Grove Baptist Church on Sunday. She wrote her first song, a ditty about her dog Sergeant, when she was seven years old. Most entertainment writers found these stories of Gentry’s relatively quaint childhood in the South irresistible, especially when juxtaposed with crude observations of her beauty and sudden wealth. She was the American dream. Gentry’s mother, Ruby Shipman, was born in the nineteenth biggest city in Arkansas. Ruby took and shed a series of surnames as she made her way through life. Bobbie’s father, Robert Streeter, was the eldest of Harvey Bell and Maude’s three sons. Ruby and Robert broke up when Bobbie was one year old,2 and once they were through, Ruby—a remarkably beautiful woman and an entertainer in her own right—was not about to stick around Mississippi. Like Bobbie, Ruby could sing and play guitar, and was also a talented visual artist who liked to sketch cartoon characters. After breaking up with Robert, Ruby headed west to California, the perfect place to cultivate another of the family talents: the fine art of reinvention. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 26

 26 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Once Bobbie was old enough, she moved from the Streeter farm to Greenwood to live with her father and attend school at North Greenwood Elementary. Chickasaw County and Greenwood, about 50 miles apart, are very different places. Chickasaw is in the Flatwoods and was populated by poor whites; Greenwood sits on the edge of the Delta and home to “politically empowered whites and disenfranchised blacks,” as John Howard succinctly observed in Men Like That: A Southern Queer History. When Bobbie talked about growing up in Mississippi, she generally referred to her time on the farm with her beloved grandparents in Chickasaw County. She often talked about her grandparents to the press, and both they and her sisters were photographed for magazine articles. She rarely mentioned her mother to reporters, though her songbook is rife with mother-daughter themes— including, of course, the inability for the mother and daughter to recognize each other’s grief while sitting around the dinner table in “Ode to Billie Joe.” By contrast, she never spoke about her father to the press and a father figure rarely appears in her songwriting. When he does, it’s never good. In “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You,” a song on Ode to Billie Joe, the narrator is a sad little girl begging her papa to let her go downtown with him now that the chores are done— but he’s reluctant to take her, and tells her the floor is still a mess. In “Ode to Billie Joe” a father is just another adult who can’t recognize the young female narrator’s pain. When he hears about Billie Joe’s death, he remarks that Billie Joe never had any sense, and with barely a pause, asks •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 27

 27 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“pass the biscuits, please.” A father figure looms ominously in “Ode to Billie Joe” in a subtler way, too. When “Ode” was released, it wasn’t clear to Mississippians which Choctaw Ridge Gentry was singing about. After all, the land has many ridges, and any of them could have been named after the Choctaw Indians, who originally settled the land. When pressed for details about which landmarks she was referring to in “Ode to Billie Joe,” Gentry explained that the Choctaw Ridge she was singing about in “Ode” was the one she could see from her father’s house. “Back on my daddy’s farm outside of Greenwood is a ridge overlooking land that belonged to an Indian chief, Greenwood LeFlore,” Gentry said. “It’s the one in the song.”3 That’s the one, of course, where nothin’ ever comes to no good. After Ruby left, Bobbie’s father started a new family.4 If the tale relayed in Patchwork’s “Mean Stepmama Blues” is based on real life, it wasn’t a happy arrangement for little Bobbie. “Mean Stepmama” is classic 12-bar blues rotation, over which Gentry woozes about what makes her stepmama so mean, including a line about polishing up a leather strap to beat your poor stepchild senseless.

Going to California Ironically, Ode to Billie Joe, the album that introduced Gentry as a “Chickasaw County Child,” also contained two songs about her looking forward to leaving the place. The heroine of “Chickasaw County Child” is a girl born seven miles outside of Woodland, where the “bitter weed” is growing wild. The song reads like the promise •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 28

 28 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Ruby may have sent to Bobbie from her new home out west—with “two postcards from California,” Gentry sings of leaving the county “a week from Monday.” The song ends on the repeated refrain “You’re gonna be somebody someday.” You can listen to “Chickasaw County Child” and then “Mississippi Delta,” originally released as the flip side to “Ode to Billie Joe,” and conclude that they were both inspired by the same week of Gentry’s young life. “Mississippi Delta” is also about taking off, including the line “can’t leave ’til a week from Monday.” As Gentry told the audience in Las Vegas, she moved to California to live with her mother and stepfather when she was 13 years old. She reportedly lived in Arcadia for two years, then moved to Palm Springs. In the 1950s, Palm Springs was a desert oasis for affluent businessmen and glamorous movie stars, a land of lavish hotels and sprawling golf resorts. Life in Palm Springs was downright swanky by almost anyone’s standards, not just a girl raised on a farm without electricity. The little family belonged to the local country club, and Bobbie spent her time modeling clothes for the local Saks, riding horses, playing golf, and studying music and art. For a time in Palm Springs, Bobbie Streeter was known as Bobbie Meyers. It was under this name that Bobbie performed with Ruby as a mother-daughter duo. From a tiny, undated piece of newspaper in one of the Bobbiebilia boxes: “Ruby and Bobbie Meyers, mother and daughter act singing to their own guitar accompaniment were brought back by earnest applause. These two are always favorites on Thunderbird shows.” The Thunderbird is a famous country club in Rancho •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 29

 29 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Seventeen-year-old Bobbie Gentry, known as Bobbie Meyers at the time, “strikes a daydreaming pose in a patch of sunflowers” while modeling in a local Southern California newspaper in March, 1960

Mirage, California. As the first golf resort in the desert, the Thunderbird was known for attracting powerful politicians and huge celebrities—just the kind of people a pretty young aspiring composer may want to be around. After graduating Palm Valley High School in 1960 at 17 years old, Gentry struck out on her own and moved to Los Angeles. In L.A., Gentry worked as a secretary, wrote songs, and earned money gigging in nightclubs and bars, visiting family in Palm Springs when she found the time. The June, 1963 issue of Palm Springs Life “The Magazine of the Desert Empire” captured Bobbie on such •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 30

 30 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Bobbie Gentry made her recording debut with rockabilly legend Jody Reynolds the same year she appears in this photograph in the June, 1963 issue of Palm Springs Life

a visit. In the photo, 20-year-old Gentry, in a fitted white blazer and black equestrian-style boots, hoists a cocktail in the air as she smiles for the camera. Though Gentry worked as a performer during high school and for many years in Los Angeles, her goal was •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 31

 31 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

to make it as a songwriter and composer. Gigs were for fun, cash, and connections. She was so uninterested in performing professionally that a source that claims to have known her well in 1963 told me he was shocked when he heard her singing on the radio in 1967. All the way up to the point that Gentry connected with Capitol Records, she was only interested in selling her songs for other artists to sing. In fact, when she brought “Ode to Billie Joe” to Capitol Records, she had Lou Rawls in mind to record it.5 It’s been claimed that before becoming famous, Gentry debuted in Vegas as a showgirl at Folies Bergère, the notorious topless burlesque show that Lou Walters6 imported from 32 rue Richer in Paris to the Tropicana showroom. But like so many Gentry myths, no one seems to be able to confirm that it’s true. A spokesperson for the Tropicana told me she was unable to confirm that Gentry ever appeared in Folies Bergère at all. She did, however, gig in Vegas. When she was 19 years old, she performed as a hula girl with Johnny Ukulele, the son of a Hawaiian prince who transformed himself into a legendary exotica lounge act in 1960s Vegas. Johnny’s troupe at the time included guitar icon Ernie Tavares. Like so many other Hawaiians, Ernie and his brother Freddie—famous for helping design the Fender Stratocaster—found fortune in Southern California, where they played a key role in starting the Hawaiian music craze. Johnny Ukulele’s grandson musician John Kaye told me that it was Ernie that introduced Gentry to Johnny Ukulele. The Polynesian craze sweeping Southern California in the early 1960s provided many opportunities for a •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 32

 32 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

dark-haired beauty who could sing, dance, and play guitar. Several of Gentry’s early gigs entailed touring the West Coast’s archipelago of tiki nightspots with various incarnations of three- or four-piece groups. It wasn’t just a passing fancy or opportunity for Gentry. She truly loved the art form, and even studied traditional hula dancing with Lani McEntire, niece of the famous McEntire brothers, who are credited for influencing Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. In 1967, when she was already working with Capitol Records but before “Ode

Before becoming famous with “Ode to Billie Joe,” Bobbie Gentry (on right) performed with the “International Four,” a Hawaiianthemed troupe that featured slack-key legend Francis Llacuna on guitar, Andre Cartier on drums, and fellow “wriggler” Eandie [Sandi] Haile •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 33

 33 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

to Billie Joe” was released, Gentry was touring with a tiki group called the “International Four.” From a glance at the International Four, it would be reasonable to assume the two gentlemen were the core of the band, and that Gentry and fellow “wriggler” were little more than eye candy. But Frank Llacuna, guitar player in the group, told me that wasn’t the case. “[The band] was her idea,” Llacuna, legendary slack-key guitar and ukulele player, explained to me on the phone from his home in Ohio. “She wanted to be in a music group, so she had contacted me through friends and we started to work together … I was fortunate enough to be a part of that.” Llacuna said that after recruiting him, Gentry hired a drummer through the union and designed a show that could tour the tiki circuit. She hired the booking agent, arranged the show, and sewed the costumes. Playing mostly what Llacuna called hapa-haoli, the group developed a following in Vegas, Tahoe, and Palm Springs clubs before landing a residency at the Trade Winds in Oxnard, California. Hapa-haoli is “Polynesian stuff, not Hawaiian-Hawaiian, but the movie Hawaiian songs,” Llacuna explained. “When a person goes to Hawaii, Caucasians visiting, the name is called haoli.” When the International Four weren’t rehearsing for gigs, they played their own songs for each other. Llacuna remembers watching Gentry play “Ode to Billie Joe,” and listening to her talk about its hook. “She had the vision that the people would talk about it, wonder what they threw over the bridge.” He recalls that Gentry had a real passion for Latin jazz, but wanted to make her mark composing country. “People had these ideas, it was either

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 34

 34 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

western country or hillbilly music,” says Llacuna. “She wanted to make it sophisticated.” “We were practicing for the gig in Oxnard at Trade Winds while she was in the recording studio with Jimmie Haskell, I think it was Capitol Records,” said Llacuna. They stopped working together around the time “Ode to Billie Joe” came out on the radio, when he split to form a new band called the Royal Tahitians. He told me he wished her the best, but couldn’t picture himself playing music called country. “At the time I just wanted to play jazz, so I was kind of stubborn, too. But she had the mind to do her thing, so I give her credit,” Llacuna said. “She did it you know? She changed country.”

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 35

 35 •

27/10/2014 16:06

5

Becoming Bobbie Gentry

Roberta Streeter of Mississippi transformed herself into Bobbie Meyers of Palm Springs, who renamed herself Bobbie Gentry around the time she got out of high school. The desire for instant sophistication couldn’t be more obvious, of course, with “Gentry” literally meaning high-society nobility. She reportedly got the idea from the character Ruby Gentry, heroine of the 1952 film of the same name. Played by Jennifer Jones, Ruby Gentry was a woman who could pull herself up by her bra straps, a poor but beautiful backwoods girl who marries the town tycoon. Her identity is caught between her backwoods upbringing and the well-todo society that never quite accepts her. The New York Times review at the time called the film “an indictment of the codes that sometimes have cleaved the South.” Ruby Gentry. The first half of the name—same as her mother—is a homage to the past. The second half is Bobbie’s bet on her future, a gamble she won, despite the long odds. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 36

 36 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Not long after taking her stage name, Gentry caught one of her first breaks. She was at a local club listening to a band, and she liked what she heard. So she approached the band leader and asked him if she could sit in on a song. It was rockabilly legend Jody Reynolds. Ralph Joseph Reynolds was born in Denver but raised an Okie with a love for western swing. In 1955, 17-year-old Reynolds saw Elvis Presley play in a small Texas club. A year later, he listened to “Heartbreak Hotel” five times in a row on a jukebox,1 then sat down and wrote “Endless Sleep,” a foreboding song about a forlorn lover who calls to him while sinking into the black waves. “Endless Sleep” was a huge hit in 1958, and has been best remembered2 for establishing the genre of melodramatic odes to teen tragedy and suicide sometimes called “teardrop rock.” As Randy Lewis wrote in Reynolds’s obituary3 in the Los Angeles Times, after “Endless Sleep” came Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel,” The Everly Brothers’ “Ebony Eyes,” Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,” and, of course, “Ode to Billie Joe.” Whether by direct line of influence or sheer kismet, “Endless Sleep” often appears with “Ode to Billie Joe” on maudlin teenybopper tragedy compilations to this day. Jody Reynolds must have been impressed with Gentry’s contribution that night on stage, because he invited her to sing on two duets, marking her recording debut: “Stranger in the Mirror” and “Ode to Love” were released in 1963 on the tiny independent surf-rock label Titan Records. “Stranger in the Mirror” keeps with Reynolds’s cheerful oeuvre. Sung from the point of view •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 37

 37 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

of a guy who gets black-out drunk then beats up a man who messed with his woman, by the end of the song he realizes he doesn’t even love the girl. The song takes place in the morning: the cops are knocking and the narrator isn’t too sure how all those bruises wound up on his face. Reynolds opens the dark waltz alone, and then Gentry chimes in on the chorus. “Ode to Love” has a similar vibe—moody doomed lovers on a dark highway drive. Both songs are great, and neither song hit. After recording with Reynolds, Gentry went back to her routine, hustling gigs while attending school in Los Angeles. Reports conflict about the extent of Gentry’s formal schooling. She consistently mentioned that she studied philosophy and painting at UCLA and music composition at the Los Angeles Conservatory. Sometimes she said she attended both institutions “very briefly,” while other times she claimed she attended UCLA for three years. Jody Reynolds never had a hit as big as his first, but he kept writing and recording songs when he wasn’t busy running his music store on Indian Avenue or selling real estate. When Gentry visited her family in Palm Springs, she would occasionally drop in to Reynolds’s store. One day, Gentry walked into the shop, plucked a guitar off the wall, and played “Ode to Billie Joe.” Reynolds’s old bandmate and good friend Bobby Craig happened to be hanging out at the store that day. In his prime, Bobby Craig was nicknamed “the King of Palm Springs Rock ’n’ Roll” and was one of Elvis Presley’s favorite acts. He knows a thing or two about performance. “She came in and picked up one of his non-electric guitars and sang ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’ ” says Craig, on the •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 38

 38 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

phone from Palm Springs. “I was absolutely astounded. It was so perfect and so professional.” He remembers hearing the song on the radio a short while after that. “I’ll tell you right now, the record sounded exactly the same as she did in the shop.” Telling me this story on the phone from California, Craig can’t say enough wonderful things about this impromptu performance from a girl he’d never seen before. “Her singing was perfect, her looks were perfect, her guitar playing was perfect,” says Craig. “And I said, ‘That is a hit record.’ ”

A Coal Miner’s Son In the mid-1960s, it was possible to feed the burgeoning Los Angeles music machine a song and watch it spit out a star. It was a heady time: a bunch of boys who never surfed were the new surf-pop superstars, Greenwich Village folkies were transforming into Laurel Canyon hippies, and musicians from all over the country flowed into town in endless droves. Gentry found camaraderie among this soulful stew of hustlers, weirdos, hacks, and virtuosos. Before long, Gentry met a character that encompassed all of those labels and then some. His name was Jim Ford.4 People can say a lot of things about Jim Ford, and they do. Born in Kentucky, James Henry Ford had a songwriting production line installed between his head and his heart. Best known as the writer of “Harry Hippie” for Bobby Womack and the best friend of Sly Stone, Ford was on his way to San Francisco by way of New Orleans when he got sidetracked in Los Angeles. Mid-1960s L.A. was the perfect spot for a talented •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 39

 39 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

songwriter and unrepentant hustler like Ford, who had the talent, and wits to take advantage of a scene where everyone was on the make. He was known to dash off a great song, and then sell it to a slew of producers before any of them realized they’d been duped.5 One of the most notorious Jim Ford stories took place in London, where he traveled to make an album with Nick Lowe’s Brinsley Schwarz as his backing band. One story goes that Brinsley Schwarz just couldn’t hack it. That’s untrue, says Swedish music journalist L-P Anderson. L-P Anderson is the only person to interview Ford at length in his later years, and is the world’s resident expert on Jim Ford’s music career. What really happened in London, Anderson says, is classic Jim Ford: he had already sold the songs that he had planned to record to another producer. Instead of owning up to the truth, Ford behaved impossibly with the band in the studio. He pretended to be too wasted to perform, a situation that was entirely believable at the time. “He was that kind of person,” says Anderson. “A very charismatic and very homemade Kentucky mountain boy.” Ford was a prodigiously talented songwriter, “but he didn’t cooperate with anyone.” In the mid-1960s, Ford was running with a crew that included Lolly and Pat Vegas, musicians better known as the Vegas Brothers. This trio wrote songs together, including “Niki Hoeky,” the only track on Ode to Billie Joe that isn’t credited to Gentry. In 1966, the year before Gentry recorded it, “Niki Hoeky” was a big hit for P. J. Proby, a Texas-born songwriter who first glimpsed success performing as Jett Powers at Liberty Records. Proby told me that he recalls Pat and Lolly Vegas writing •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 40

 40 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

the bones of “Niki Hoeky.” “Pat, Lolly and Jim Ford were all sitting around my living room in my house upon Saint Ives Drive one night, singing and drinking when Lolly came up with the song,” Proby told me in an email. “They just wrote it, and I immediately said, ‘Can I do it?’ Lolly said, ‘Yeah, sure!’ … and we were in the studio the next day.” Proby met Gentry through Jim Ford, who sources say she was dating at the time. Proby remembers Ford and Gentry hung out at the pool at the Hollywood Hawaiian, an infamous hangout for struggling Los Angeles musicians and out-of-towners.6 Around the same time, Ford was introducing Gentry to labels and publishers.7 If Ford was trying to help or hustle her is unclear, though perhaps illuminated by the details of their visit to Del-Fi Records. In the mid-1960s, Del-Fi was known for its open door policy: Practically anyone could walk in and try out, and practically anyone did. Ford had scored a contract with Del-Fi after owner Bob Keane heard P. J. Proby’s rendition8 of “Niki Hoeky” on the radio. So Ford had a little juice when he walked into the office of Mustang/Bronco, the name of Del-Fi’s R&B subsidiary label. There, Jim Ford introduced Bobbie Gentry to a gentleman we now know as Barry White. He wasn’t known as Barry White then, of course. Before the silk sheets and panty heaps shtick, White was known as Barry Eugene Carter, an A&R man earning $20 a week looking for the next big thing. White recalls the day an unknown Bobbie Gentry walked through the open door.9 “A kid named Jimmy Ford walked into our office with this shabby-looking country girl at his side,” writes White. “I could tell in a •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 41

 41 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

minute he was a strong songwriter, the real thing—gifted even—with a song that he, unfortunately, couldn’t sing. There was too much of a Southern twang to his voice, which is why he wanted the girl to record it for him. I took the song, which I loved, to Bob [Keane] and told him we had to buy it.” White wrote that Ford was “so desperate for money, just to pay his rent he was willing to sell the rights to the song outright for fifty dollars.” Luckily for Gentry, Keane didn’t like it, and passed. Not too long after that, Mustang/Bronco closed its doors. Thanks to White’s autobiography, we know that Ford claimed that he wrote “Ode to Billie Joe” before it was even released. He maintained that he actually wrote the song for the rest of his life. A former friend of Gentry’s told me that Ford approached him in a Southern California supermarket in the late 1970s to tell him as much. Ford didn’t make any public claims, though, and he wasn’t exactly in a position to do so. In 1981, Nick Lowe, who cites Ford as his biggest musical influence, was recording in an L.A. studio when Ford surprised him by showing up with a sack of demo tapes. Ford stomped off before they could record anything. After that, Ford went off the map entirely, eventually finding Jesus at the bottom of a bottle. “I got fed up with how the music business works and all the bullshit going on,” Ford said.10 Ford’s whereabouts were largely unknown for 25 years. Then, in 2006, L-P Anderson found him living in Mendocino County, California. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 42

 42 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

When Anderson trekked from Sweden to California to interview Jim Ford, he splurged on renting a cherry red convertible. Talking to me via Skype from his home in Sweden, Anderson laughs while justifying his ostentatious car rental. This was America! he says. This was California! According to Anderson, when he pulled his shiny steed into a trailer park in Northern California, residents wandered outside and stared. Then Ford darkened his door, and everyone shuffled back inside. “They obviously had bad experiences [with] him,” Anderson explains. To his amazement, inside Ford’s trailer, Anderson discovered cassettes and bags full of old reel-to-reel tapes scattered all over the floor. Over the course of a wideranging interview that lasted days, Anderson asked Ford about “Ode to Billie Joe.” “I remembered this [story about “Ode”], and I asked Jim about it,” says Anderson. “And he picked it up in the back of his head. ‘Yeah, you know what? Yeah, she stole that song from me. I was living with her and I got her the record contract and I wrote the song.’ ” There are, in fact, eerie parallels between the lives and music of Bobbie Gentry and Jim Ford. Most obviously, they both recorded classic albums in the late 1960s in Los Angeles, and subsequently dropped out of sight—though Ford eventually resurfaced by way of L-P Anderson. Both of their signature songs are semi-autobiographical story-songs about the plight of growing up in a specific place in the South. “Ode to Billie Joe” is about a girl from Chickasaw County, Mississippi. Ford’s “Harlan County” is a story-song about a boy growing up in, and trying to get out of, Harlan County, Kentucky. It’s the title track •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 43

 43 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

to Harlan County, Ford’s obscure 1969 classic record, a rollicking collision of country funk, gospel organ, and closing-credit, driving-down-the-highway AM gold. Though “Harlan County” lyrically echoes “Ode,” musically, it’s closer to “Mississippi Delta,” with its swamp-rock swagger and Hendrix-y riffs. Ford’s “Dr. Handy’s Dandy Candy” has the hambone beat and repetitive gibberish jive Gentry favors on tracks like “Reunion” on The Delta Sweete. And, of course, they both claim to have written “Ode to Billie Joe.” “He was kind of a special character, but for all the stuff he said there was always truth behind him,” says Anderson. He gives examples. “I found pictures of a young girl, and asked, ‘Is this your daughter?’ And [he said] ‘No, that’s Rebecca, Marlon Brando’s daughter.’ That turned out to be true.” As Anderson later found out, Ford did indeed have a relationship with Rebecca by way of his relationship with Brando’s ex-wife Movita Castenada. When Ford talked about being featured in Playboy, Anderson thought he was lying until he discovered it was true when he researched it later. These unlikely stories have made Anderson entertain Ford’s claims—to an extent. “My guess is he had something to do with the song,” says Anderson. “I don’t think he just grabbed it out of the air.” It’s possible Ford suggested a lyric edit, or a chord change, and in his mind that meant that he wrote the song. “When [Ford] was writing together with Bobby Womack later on in life, they also fell into arguments because Bobby Womack said to me that Jim Ford always wanted to rewrite a song, all the time, rewrite again and •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 44

 44 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

again.” His collaborators didn’t always want to stick around while Ford obsessively fiddled with the track. “So sometimes it happened that Bobby [Womack] took the song and recorded it and got a hit with the song, and then Jim [would get angry] because, ‘Oh, you nicked my song and you stole it from me.’ ” Anderson muses that “something like this” could have happened with Gentry. “I don’t think Jim is a liar regarding this thing,” he says. Ford’s old friend P. J. Proby, however, dismisses the idea altogether. “Jim Ford was one of my closest friends since he got out of the Marine Corps in 1960,” Proby told me. “He didn’t write ‘Ode to Billie Joe.’ He tried to steal it from Bobbie Gentry and tried to make her put his name on it.” I called Pat Vegas, one of the musicians who collaborated with Ford on “Niki Hoeky” to ask him what he thought of Ford’s claim. He didn’t even answer the question. He just laughed. Ford’s main argument to prove his supposed authorship was that Bobbie never managed to write another song like it. But Gentry’s second biggest hit, “Fancy,” echoes the style of “Ode.” In fact, her catalogue is full of character-driven story-songs that sound like short stories.11 Ford also liked to point out that Gentry never had another commercial hit as big as “Ode.” Ford’s argument that artistic value is best measured by financial success is unconvincing, though, given some of his greatest artistic achievements were on spools of tape scattered across the floor of his trailer. Perhaps sensing Anderson’s hesitation to believe him, Ford swore to Anderson that he had definitive proof that he wrote “Ode to Billie Joe.” •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 45

 45 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“Jim said there was a tape recording of him doing the song, the original demo,” says Anderson. “He said he recorded it, and [told me] ‘you could actually hear it because I did my version first.’ ” Before heading back to Sweden, Anderson collected all of Ford’s tapes. When he got home, he carefully catalogued each one of them, organizing the recordings into a project that became Jim Ford: The Sounds of Our Time, a critically acclaimed 2007 Bear Family release that includes Harlan County and previously unreleased masters. I ask Anderson about Ford’s version of “Ode to Billie Joe.” “I have all the demos,” Anderson tells me. “And I haven’t found the song.”

Pat Vegas Pat Vegas is a bassist and producer who started his career as a member of the house band on Shindig!, a variety show that aired on ABC from 1964 to 1966. After performing for years with his brother Lolly12 as the Vegas Brothers, they formed Redbone. Billed as the first all Native-American rock band, legend has it that Jimi Hendrix himself talked the boys into forming an all Native-American group. “Jimi made me aware of my roots,” Pat Vegas told the press. “He’d say ‘Native American is beautiful, man. Be proud of that!’ ”13 But Redbone drummer Pete DePoe, a relative of Leonard Peltier, has said that he is the only real-deal Native American in the group.14 Before heading to Hollywood, the Vegas Brothers were the Vasquez brothers, MexicanAmericans born in Fresno, California. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 46

 46 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Vegas recalls the genesis of “Niki Hoeky” differently than his old friend P. J. Proby. He says he and his brother Lolly wrote “Niki Hoeky” before they arrived in Los Angeles. “We wrote it back when we were living back in Salinas, California,” says Vegas. “Way back then.” On the phone from L.A., Vegas tells me that Jim Ford got a songwriting co-credit on “Niki Hoeky” because he was “one of the guys” who came in and helped them put the song together, polish it up. “My brother and I more or less had a song that we did,” says Vegas, “[then] Jim came in and helped put it in order.” Though I contacted Vegas to talk about “Niki Hoeky,” he wound up having a lot more to say about Bobbie Gentry. “I discovered her,” he said. This is Vegas’s story: Throughout the 1960s, the Vegas Brothers worked as the house band in L.A. nightclubs like the groovy vampire-and-ghoul go-go themed Haunted House, Gazzarri’s, and the Red Velvet. One afternoon, Pat Vegas popped into the Red Velvet to pick up his paycheck when he spotted a beautiful woman. “She was walking in front of me,” Vegas says. “I looked at her and I said, ‘Damn!’ I said, ‘Look at this body!’ ” The woman was modeling clothes for photographers. Vegas says he hung around until she was done with the gig, then followed her to her dressing room. “I said, ‘Do you sing, by any chance?’ Because I was producing people at the time. ‘Yeah, I play a little piano,’ she said. ‘I sing a little bit.’ “So we got together and she played,” says Vegas. They often hung out together at his house on Carlton Street, playing each other their newest songs. Vegas recalls that •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 47

 47 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Gentry’s songs had a bossa nova flavor to them that he dug. He remembers when he turned her on to an early version of “Niki Hoeky.” “She wanted to learn it right away,” he says. “I didn’t know she was going to record it, but she did.” Vegas also remembers the first time Gentry played “Ode to Billie Joe” for him. “I said, ‘Wow, baby, that’s really a great song!’ ” Like Bobby Craig after watching Gentry play the song in Jody Reynolds’s music shop, Vegas says he immediately envisioned it as a hit single. “I said, ‘Why don’t we go into the studio and lay it down?’ ” Vegas told me that they recorded the song, and four other original compositions written by Bobbie, at Nashville West on Melrose Ave. “We went into the studio to cut it and she took it to Capitol,” says Vegas. “And the rest is history.”

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 48

 48 •

27/10/2014 16:06

6

“Produced by Kelly Gordon and Bobby Paris”

Bobby Paris was a brown-eyed Puerto-Rican man best remembered as a “blue-eyed soul” singer.1 Born Robert Pares in New York, Paris caught his big break in 1966 with “Night Owl,” a huge hit for Cameo-Parkway when the label needed one badly. “Night Owl” got Paris in the door at Capitol Records, where in the summer of 1967 he recorded “I Walked Away,” a song co-written with Jill Jones. “I Walked Away” is bright, up-tempo partyanthem soul—in other words, classic Bobby Paris. But it would be one of Paris’s only releases on Capitol. The title is ironic, since the last thing Bobby Paris wanted to do was walk away from Capitol Records. Bobby Paris is a key figure in the creation of “Ode to Billie Joe.” Pick up an original orange-and-yellow-swirl 45 of “Ode to Billie Joe” with the flip side “Mississippi Delta,” and it says “Produced by: Kelly Gordon and Bobby Paris.” Sometimes the producer credits on the •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 49

 49 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

single were listed as “Kelly Gordon featuring Bobby Paris.” By the time the full Ode to Billie Joe LP was released, Paris’s name was scrubbed from the credits, and for the most part, from the album’s popular history. In 1966, Bobby Paris spent his days recording at Whitney Recording Studio in Glendale, and his nights gigging as the Bobby Paris Trio at bars like the Losers Lounge, a trendy topless joint on La Cienega Blvd. Whitney studio was known for a huge 50` x 50` room that was big enough to hold both a large orchestra and the gigantic Robert Morton organ on premise. In its heyday, mostly Christian music and gospel music was recorded at Whitney, though mainstream musicians like Aretha Franklin, Barry White, and Pat Benatar recorded in the room, too.2 I spoke to Bobby Paris’s widow, Judith Paris, about this period of time in Paris’s life. As she remembers it, Paris dropped in to a bar near the studio to have a drink after work, noticed the pretty singer, and struck up a conversation. “[Bobby Paris] did say that when [he first met Bobbie Gentry], he told her that he could take her to Capitol [and] she was interested in that,” recalls Judith Paris. She also remembers that Paris was impressed not just with Gentry’s performance, but also by the fact that she had already written a ton of original songs. When Gentry met Paris, she was more eager than ever to sell her work. At the time, she was earning $450 a week gigging, singing and arranging vocal harmonies for a small group. “I was working to support myself as a performer, and then I started making a good living at it,” she said. “Which is worse.”3 As the New Year’s Eve ball dropped ushering •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 50

 50 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

in 1967, Bobbie Gentry had made a resolution: she was going to quit her nightclub gigs and find full-time work as a songwriter.4 “[Bobby Paris] brought her to Capitol,” Judith told me on the phone from her home in Nevada. “That’s what he always told me.” Though Judith didn’t marry Paris until 2001, they were friends since 1969. In 1967, the year “Ode to Billie Joe” was released, Bobby Paris was married to Sondra Currie,5 an actress best known in recent years for her role in The Hangover trilogy. I contacted Currie and asked her if she remembered anything about his collaboration with Bobbie Gentry. She told me that she clearly remembers Bobby Paris and Bobbie Gentry working together. “I can tell you that Bobby Paris and Bobbie Gentry collaborated on ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’” Currie told me in an email. “It was really the two of them who pulled it together.” Gentry and Paris reportedly made a deal. “In exchange for her playing rhythm guitar on his recordings, [Bobby Paris] engineered a twelve-song demo of her singing her own compositions and playing acoustic guitar.”6 According to reports of the legal dispute that ensued, they agreed to give each other one percent of the selling price of the other’s records sold. “The problem started once they went to Capitol Records and Kelly Gordon came on board,” says Currie. Kelly Gordon is the Capitol Records staff producer who shared co-producing credit with Bobby Paris on the initial pressing of “Ode to Billie Joe.” In one of the oldest stories in the business, he reportedly also fell in love with his protégée, and they had an on-and-off romance •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 51

 51 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

outside the studio. Gordon went on to produce more records with Gentry. At least one report indicates they were once engaged. “[Bobbie Gentry] reneged on their deal,” Judith Paris tells me. “That’s what happened.” The fallout over producing credit on “Ode to Billie Joe” and “Mississippi Delta” landed everyone in court when Bobby Paris decided to sue both Bobbie Gentry and Capitol Records. In his lawsuit, Paris alleged that Capitol agreed to purchase the “Ode to Billie Joe” and “Mississippi Delta” master recordings from him for $1,000, plus a percentage of the royalties. Reports indicate that Capitol cut Paris a $1,000 check, but “refused” to put the royalties agreement in writing. It’s unclear whether Paris initially believed he could settle the matter with Gentry and Capitol out of court or if he just tried to forget about it, but Paris waited until 1969 to file a lawsuit seeking $100,000 from Gentry and $300,000 from Capitol “in punitive and exemplary damages.” Paris claimed an “ownership interest in the master of multi-million-selling ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ and alleged he was owed by contract one-fifth of Gentry’s five percent mechanical royalties on the record.”7 In June, 1973, Gentry and Paris testified against one another in Superior Court Judge Max F. Deutz’s courtroom in Los Angeles. By that point, Gentry’s career with Capitol Records was already over. Gentry argued that she didn’t renege on their deal, because Paris misrepresented his role in getting her signed to Capitol. “Gentry testified she had called off [the] deal when she learned that Paris’ claim he was instrumental in talking Capitol Records into hiring her was not the case.”8 •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 52

 52 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

String arranger Jimmie Haskell remembers a different version of events leading to the dispute. “The story, as I understood it … is that Bobbie was supposed to get a thousand dollars in royalties,” Haskell told me on the phone from his home. “[Capitol] told her that they had the check for her, so she went up there to pick it up at Capitol, and they said, ‘Oh, your co-producer Bobby Paris picked up the check.’ Oh. So she called Bobby and said, ‘Where’s my share?’ ” In this version of events, Paris told Gentry that he already spent the money. “So she said, ‘OK, you’re off the record. You’re not going to get any royalties at all.’ And she told Capitol that … as a result of that, [Bobby Paris] lost a lot of money.” Haskell’s recollection doesn’t make sense to Paris’s ex-wife Sondra Currie. She says Paris was making decent money with his trio at the time, and wasn’t hard up for cash. Paris won the legal battle, but lost the war. The jury award of $32,227.40 amounted to one percent of royalties on “Ode to Billie Joe” and “Mississippi Delta.” The belated check was, of course, peanuts compared to what he would have earned from royalties in the long run. And Bobby Paris felt he lost more than money in the feud. He believed he was blackballed by Capitol Records and, to a degree, the industry. “It was a pretty bleak time for Bobby Paris,” says Currie. “Being very young, extremely gifted and having a big hit that he was part of but was not being acknowledged for … I don’t think Bobby ever really recovered from that.” After the court case was settled, Paris hardly ever spoke another word about Bobbie Gentry or “Ode to Billie Joe” for the rest of his life, not even years later •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 53

 53 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

when he had a golden opportunity to tell people who would’ve cared. In 1999, Paris received a phone call from a stranger asking him if he was the same Bobby Paris who sang “Night Owl.” The caller was Ian Levine, an English DJ best known in the U.S. as a Dr. Who megafan who led a campaign for the BBC to recover lost episodes. Levine was searching for Bobby Paris because he was working on a documentary about England’s Northern Soul scene. As it turns out, entirely unbeknownst to Paris, he was worshipped as the musical godfather of the niche English Northern Soul club scene. Northern Soul fans are obsessed with lesser-known 1960s up-tempo American soul tracks. British journalist Neil Rushton, an expert on Northern Soul, explained to me that while remaining virtually unknown in the States, Paris was a “cult figure” to this particular group of English party people. “The Northern Soul scene is more about records, rather than the people who made them,” Rushton explained to me in an email. “[But] Bobby kind of defied that, as he had three huge records, ‘Night Owl,’ ‘I Walked Away’ and ‘Per-so-nal-ly.’ ” Paris’s status in the scene was also unusual because, Rushton noted, “he was white.” In any case, Paris was invited to England, where he played in front of a huge, adoring audience. Even though Rushton has written extensively about the scene that idolizes Bobby Paris’s music, and spent days with him in England, he was surprised to learn that Paris had anything to do with “Ode to Billie Joe.” “He didn’t mention it,” Rushton said. Judith Paris told me that even though Paris never talked about it, he saved old articles about the lawsuit •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 54

 54 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

and a copy of the canceled check dated October 9, 1973 in a box. In response to my phone call, she recently went through the clippings. In each photo, Gentry’s face is scratched out in pen.

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 55

 55 •

27/10/2014 16:06

7

The Summer of “Ode to Billie Joe”

Of the two songs initially released with Bobby Paris credited as co-producer, it was “Mississippi Delta,” not “Ode to Billie Joe,” that got Bobbie Gentry in the door at Capitol Records. It’s surprising, not only because of the enduring myth that “Ode” was released as the B-side, but also because the songs sound nothing alike. While “Ode” is often thought of as a folk ballad, “Mississippi Delta” is a swampy, bluesy chunk of R&B that casts Gentry as a chicken-fried soul singer. It makes sense, though, that Gentry was shopping “Mississippi Delta,” because that was exactly the kind of sound that was burning up the charts in 1967. Gentry often spoke of walking into the studio with a demo in her hand. According to Capitol’s press release, she walked into their studio, recorded “Ode to Billie Joe” and it was on the radio two weeks later. The real story is likely the less sexy one reported in Billboard: Music •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 56

 56 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

publisher Larry Shayne sent Gentry’s “demo” over to Capitol in February. According to an unofficial Gentry discography maintained in part by world-recognized discographer Michel Ruppli, Capitol purchased and registered “Mississippi Delta” March 13, 1967. The production of “Mississippi Delta” is just as mysterious as its more famous flip side. It seems “Mississippi Delta” arrived at Capitol Records fully formed, and no one knows exactly where it came from. I didn’t find evidence of so much as an overdub session for the tune at Capitol, though the local musicians’ union had contracts on file for other songs that appear on Ode to Billie Joe. It seems the version of “Mississippi Delta” that we hear on the record is exactly what Gentry and Paris created, complete with a full horn section of unidentified, uncredited session players. Despite Capitol’s claim to the contrary, all evidence suggests “Ode to Billie Joe” arrived at Capitol fully formed as well. At least, almost fully formed. “The master tape was done in Bobby Paris’s studio,” Jimmie Haskell told me. “[Paris] sat in the booth while she sat on a stool and sang and played. There wasn’t much production to do on that, all he had to do was open the mike and push the record button … that is the demo that we added our strings to at Capitol. She did not re-sing it at Capitol.” So when Gentry spoke of bringing Capitol Records a “demo,” what she meant was fully produced master recordings of “Mississippi Delta” and “Ode to Billie Joe” without strings. This crucial distinction explains both Paris’s legal dispute and Gentry’s claim that she in fact produced “Ode to Billie Joe.” •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 57

 57 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

So where were “Ode to Billie Joe” and “Mississippi Delta” recorded? In all likelihood, the Gentry-Paris master tapes were recorded at Bobby Paris’s old stomping grounds: Whitney Recording Studio in Glendale. We may never know for sure. Music Corporation of America (MCA) purchased Whitney Studio, then shut it down in 1978. Frank Kejmer, 76, is a retired studio engineer who worked closely with Paris at Whitney. If it was recorded at Whitney, Kejmer engineered it. I called Kejmer and asked him about Bobbie Gentry. He paused. “The name rings a bell,” he said. Kejmer recalled Paris and Gentry working together at the studio, though he can’t remember if he engineered the session. I asked him if it’s possible any paperwork is sitting in boxes gathering dust in a deserted office somewhere. The Morton organ was sold to evangelist Billy Graham’s keyboard player and then put into storage. Could contracts proving Bobbie Gentry recorded “Ode to Billie Joe” and “Mississippi Delta,” and perhaps the rest of this 12-song mystery demo, be sitting in storage somewhere, too? Kejmer told me the studio owners gave away all the records to the artists who recorded there, or threw them in the garbage when the studio closed. “That’s a lot of history lost,” Kejmer said. “Isn’t it?” Once the demo made it to Capitol Records, it landed in the lap of Kelly Gordon. In early 1967, Kelly Gordon was a brand-new Capitol producer with a taste for raunchy honky-tonk-inflected R&B, and he was looking to make his mark: “Ode to Billie Joe” was the first album •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 58

 58 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

he produced for Capitol Records. Though he co-wrote the Frank Sinatra hit “That’s Life,”1 Gordon’s personal predilections are best heard unfiltered on Defunked, the 1969 album he released as a solo artist on Capitol Records. Defunked is a greasy slab of R&B-tinged country funk featuring “Independently Poor,” a tasty number anchored by Gordon’s full-throated aural-sex vocals. Listen to Defunked a couple of times, and it’s little wonder2 that Gordon and Gentry hit it off musically: They shared a taste for a baroque, over-the-top kitchensink production style. The restraint used on “Ode to Billie Joe” was an exception to Gentry’s style, not a rule. Gordon heard “Mississippi Delta” and loved it. All he needed was for Gentry to bring in a B-side for the single. He asked if she had any other “regional” tunes. Gentry told him yes, actually, she did. Producer, composer, and musician David Axelrod was Gordon’s former boss at Capitol Records. Axelrod remembers the day Gordon heard “Ode to Billie Joe.” “He came into the office and he was actually crying,” Axelrod, 82, told me on the phone from his home in California. “Tears were coming out of his eyes … I said, ‘Jesus Christ, man! Sit down, have a drink!’ ” Axelrod pulled out an ever-present bottle of scotch and two glasses. “I said, ‘Now what is the problem?’ Gordon, holding the demo and a lead sheet, says, ‘I’ve got a record, and I know it’s a hit.’ “I said, ‘Kelly, never use the term hit in my office! I don’t like the term hit. You make a good record. It takes a lot more than a good record to make a hit. You have to •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 59

 59 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

have great promotion, and a lot of marketing and a lot of money goes into it. Unless you get really lucky.” Gordon was upset because he wanted to record “Ode to Billie Joe,” but the Vice President of A&R at the time hated it. “[The Vice President] told Kelly to forget about it,” Axelrod says. “The reason was, and let’s face it, [“Ode to Billie Joe”] is about abortion.” Axelrod asked Gordon who owned the song. When Gordon told him that music publisher Larry Shayne owned it, Axelrod burst out laughing. Larry Shayne was an old drinking buddy, and a really good friend. Axelrod says he called Shayne up and asked him how much he wanted for it. Shayne told him $10,000. It was a deal. One condition: Shayne told Axelrod that if Capitol bought “Ode to Billie Joe,” they couldn’t add a rhythm section. No one said anything, though, about adding strings. Jimmie Haskell remembers getting the call for “Ode to Billie Joe.” “Kelly Gordon called me the night before the session and said, ‘We’re [recording] the Checkmates tomorrow, and I want to add a new girl that I just signed at the end of the Checkmates session.’ ” On May 24, 1967, he headed over to 1750 N. Vine Street to record the new girl. Jimmie Haskell came up under Lew Chudd at the appropriately named Imperial Records, where he produced more than 75 singles for Ricky Nelson, who generally didn’t like strings.3 Though his services were already in demand when he cut strings for “Ode to Billie Joe” at Capitol Studios, he was about to get much busier. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 60

 60 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

When Haskell got to the studio that afternoon, Gordon played “Mississippi Delta” for him. “That’s the A-side,” Gordon told Haskell. They were only going to work on the B-side.

“The Long Version” It’s long been a matter of some controversy whether or not the original version of “Ode to Billie Joe” was seven minutes long, or if it’s just a myth, a holy grail of a recording that will never be found. “It exists somewhere,” says Haskell. “Kelly edited it down.” Haskell says Gordon sliced out whole stanzas of Gentry’s original demo in order to whittle the original seven-minute version down to a more radio-friendly four minutes and fifteen seconds. Since Gordon had already cut the tape by almost half by the time he heard it, Haskell says he never personally heard the long version. If an original long version of the so-called demo ever existed, only Bobby Paris, Bobbie Gentry, and Kelly Gordon have heard it. Only one of those people is alive, and she isn’t talking. A look at an early handwritten draft held in Special Collections at the University of Mississippi supports the idea of a longer song. The draft features verses that don’t appear in the recorded version including an opening verse, where we learn that the narrator had a name. Sally Jane Ellison is the girl whose heart is broken when she hears Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. On the handwritten sheet, the first verse opens, “Sally Jane Ellison’s been missing since the first week in June.” Gentry scratched that •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 61

 61 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

line out and rewrote it as, “People don’t see Sally Jane in town anymore.” The rest of the stanza, which was either never recorded or edited out by Kelly Gordon at Capitol Studios: People don’t see Sally Jane in town anymore There’s a lot o’ speculatin’ she’s not actin’ like she did before Some say she knows more than she’s willin’ to tell But she stays quiet and a few think it’s just as well No one really knows what went on up on Choctaw Ridge The day that Billy Jo McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge.

Haskell recalls listening to what he believes was Gordon’s cut of Gentry’s original master recording. “It was just her … playing guitar and singing. So I asked, ‘What do you want me to write on it?’ I was used to people telling me, ‘Here’s the demo, the songwriter has a strings idea.’ Well, he didn’t show me anything like that.” As he’s recounted to many writers over the years, Haskell remembers Gordon telling him, “Just cover it with strings so we won’t be embarrassed.”4 Back in the studio, Haskell listened to the demo again. It sounded like a film, he thought, so he decided to score it like one. He took a look around to assess the instruments and equipment on hand. That night, by chance, he only had a small orchestra of four violins and two cellos available. “Normally, it would have been four violins and a cello or four violins and a viola and a cello, but for some reason or another [that was the set-up],” says Haskell. He’d be fine; he had a lot of confidence in his session players. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 62

 62 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Bobbie Gentry donated a handwritten copy of an early, if not first, draft of “Ode to Billie Joe” to the University of Mississippi, where it is still held in Special Collections. Printed with permission of Gregory A. Johnson, Blues Curator Associate Professor Archives & Special Collections, University of Mississippi library •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 63

 63 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

The late Sydney Sharp was on lead violin. Mike Deasy, who Haskell knew from session work with Ricky Nelson, was on guitar. Jesse Ehrlich was Haskell’s all-time favorite bass player. He was good enough, even, to run with Haskell’s inspired idea to use the second cello as a bass. “I [couldn’t] make it a regular bass, like doh-doh-doh, dohdohdohdoh, which is what all the bass players were playing on rock tunes,” Haskell explained to me. “So instead, I made it doh, two-three-four, doh-doh, two-threefour. That’s three notes in two bars. I thought that was the best number of notes I could have him play and still have it fit the song to go with Bobbie’s rhythm.” Whiskey bottle in hand, Kelly Gordon listened as Haskell instructed bass player Ehrlich to pluck the cello as a bass. Then Gordon walked over and knelt down on the floor in front of Ehrlich. He put his ear to the cello’s F-hole, then called to engineer Joe Polito to mic it up close. “He wanted to get the fattest sound out of the cello,” explained Haskell. Guitarist Mike Deasy also remembers the overdub session for “Ode to Billie Joe.” “They moved [Bobbie] to the vocal booth. Donning earphones, I could hear her breathing into the Telefunken.” By email, Deasy told me that Gentry sang a scratch vocal that day, just to give the musicians a guide. “It was for our benefit,” he says. Deasy felt great about the session, felt it all click. “Sometimes Haskell was a genius,” said Deasy. “Like [Simon and Garfunkel’s] ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water,’ adding strings to what Larry Knechtel had played on the piano. [Haskell] had a knack for … coming up with something greater than the sum of its parts.”5 •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 64

 64 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Haskell is humble about his work. He insists that aside from using the second cello as a bass, he didn’t do anything fancy for “Ode to Billie Joe.” He says he simply employed his go-to strategy for scoring pop songs at the time. As usual, he laid strings down at the very beginning of a song, to prepare listeners for what was coming. After the introduction, he dropped all the strings “except for the pizzicato cello for about a minute.” Then he brought the strings back in again. The only twist he added to that pattern for “Ode” was that he asked the players to bend the notes. He busted out laughing while explaining to me that after “Ode” became a big hit, people told him that he really captured “the Delta sound” by bending the notes. A part of the arrangement that listeners tend to remember most is what Jill Sobule described as the “sickly-sounding fall” that spirals down at the end of the song. Haskell insisted there was nothing much special about that, either. “There is a phrase that music arrangers and composers use when they’re accompanying scenes in a movie, [like when] somebody is going up or down the stairs. We ‘Mickey Mouse it.’ The music goes up or down. So at the end of the song, when she says she threw [flowers] off the bridge, I had the strings go down.” Haskell confirmed that, as Deasy said, the vocals Gentry laid down during that session were just a guide for the musicians—no new vocal or guitar tracks were added at Capitol Studio. Like “Mississippi Delta,” the so-called demo of “Ode to Billie Joe” was really the master recording. “It’s her demo,” Haskell said. “With my strings.” Bobby Paris wasn’t at the session. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 65

 65 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“Matter of fact,” says Haskell, “I don’t even know what he looks like.” Haskell’s string arrangement transformed the song and re-arranged Capitol’s priorities. When the A&R team met the morning after the session, Gordon played both “Mississippi Delta” and the newly enhanced version of “Ode to Billie Joe.” After listening to both tracks, they decided to release “Ode to Billie Joe” as the A-side of Gentry’s debut single. It was a risky choice, because at 4:15, the song’s length was a liability. At the time, with few exceptions, DJs refused to play songs more than three minutes long. When the Doors released “Light My Fire” earlier in 1967, Elektra shaved the 7:05 album track down into a 4:40 long radio version, and then chiseled it to an even shorter 2:52 version to help get it on the radio. The band was pissed, but as Doors guitarist Robby Krieger lamented, “If you wanted to get on AM you had to have a short song.”6 After the meeting, Capitol A&R chief Voyle Gilmore asked Gordon, “Why did you have to record a song that long?” “Why did you change it to the A-side?” Gordon retorted. Though part of the legend of “Ode” is that it was a surprise hit, the execs at Capitol knew “Ode to Billie Joe” was good. When it was released, it was spotlighted as a potential top 60 hit in that week’s Billboard: “Fascinating material and performance by a new composer-lyricist that should be heard and programmed, leading to top sales. Potent lyric content that is worth the unusual length of the disk.”7 •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 66

 66 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

They didn’t wait for public reaction to the song before deciding to invest in developing Gentry as an artist, either. Gentry was signed to Capitol Records on June 13. “Ode to Billie Joe” was released on July 10. “Ode to Billie Joe” sounded like nothing else on the radio at the time: Finger-plucked seventh chords pinwheel beneath the swelling and sighing of strings. A sultry voice lulls the listener into a hot and hazy summer afternoon somewhere down South. “It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty, delta day.” The atmosphere—the room, as they say—is full, a soft slow hot breath that fills the spaces between Gentry’s spare, rhythmic guitar. The orchestral parts are most often described as cinematic, but that word’s not quite right. By cinematic, we usually mean an experience that feels both magnified and somehow removed from the present moment. Haskell’s arrangement makes “Ode” feel less like watching a movie and more like rough edges of a lost memory rising to consciousness, or like remembering watching a movie long ago, of sensing a stir within, a signal that demands pay attention. “By August 26, when the record hit number one, it was as if every state had stopped to listen to this quiet, unsolved mystery,” wrote music critic Greil Marcus. “And the quiet might have been the hook, the special noise that caught the nation’s ear.”8 Like most people, Marcus was driving in his car the first time he heard “Ode to Billie Joe.” It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty, delta day, I was out choppin’ cotton and my brother was bailin’ hay; •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 67

 67 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat, And Mama hollered at the back door, “Y’all remember to wipe your feet.”

Gentry’s delivery is steady, almost stoic. The mood is dark. By the time Mama tells us she got some news this morning from Choctaw Ridge, we know it isn’t any good. As Gentry gets closer to the awful truth, her voice deepens, constricting around the vowels like a snake coiled on a tree branch. And then we learn what happened: “Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge.” “She knows why Billie Joe went to his death,” wrote Marcus. “She knows what they threw into the black water, but not only will she not tell, no one around the table even thinks to ask.”9 Greil Marcus wrote that he got so caught up in trying to follow the song’s “sliding phrases,” he smashed into the car in front of him. The song was inescapable in the summer of 1967, and so was the debate about what the narrator threw off the bridge.10 Listeners believed solving the small, concrete mystery would lead to solving the bigger, existential one. Some people guessed it was a ring. Others—like David Axelrod and the former Vice President of Capitol Records—were convinced it was a baby or a fetus, and that the girl had a miscarriage or an abortion. Still others thought that it was a comment on racial relations. After all, it was the waters of the Tallahatchie River that, for three days in the summer of 1955, held the lifeless body •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 68

 68 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy kidnapped, beaten, and murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman. Gentry repeatedly said that focusing on what was thrown off the bridge missed the point. When inevitably asked during interviews, Gentry would say the song was about indifference, about the fact “that this boy’s death did not get his neighbors involved [and] that unless you are very close to someone, tragedy doesn’t involve you.” But she wasn’t even protesting indifference, she said, just describing it. “I’m not so sure indifference isn’t a good thing,” she said in 1967. “If we were all totally affected by tragedy we’d be afraid to go anywhere or do anything.”11 Gentry said the mystery object thrown off the bridge was just a literary device she used to establish motivation. “You have to establish some motivation,” she said. “What happened the day before on the bridge was the motivation, but I left it open so the listener could draw his own conclusion.”12 Capitol expected “Ode to Billie Joe” to be a hit—but not that big a hit. Thanks to those mysterious lyrics, that “special quiet,” and Gentry’s sexy, husky voice, “Ode to Billie Joe” was what former Capitol Records President Don Zimmerman calls a “magic” record. In the summer of 1967, Zimmerman was working as a field marketing man for Capitol. “Capitol came up with an idea of taking regions that were spread out, and covering them with a sales and promotion person,” Zimmerman, 79, told me on the phone from his home in California. “Back in the early days of rock and roll and R&B, the majors weren’t really into it. RCA had Presley, and the Beatles were at Capitol, but there weren’t that •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 69

 69 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

many rock and roll records coming out of major labels, so top 40 was all done by the independents.” Part of Zimmerman’s job was to adapt the grassroots promotional strategy for Capitol. “I thought I had the best job in the world,” Zimmerman told me. “And maybe I did.” It sounds it: in the summer of 1967, all he had to do was drive around sunny California with a box of records rattling in his trunk, turning DJs on to new music. Zimmerman remembers giving radio DJs the first promotional 45s of “Ode to Billie Joe.” “The single came out, and I took it to radio stations, and a lot of people weren’t quite clear if it was a pop record, country record, or R&B,” recalls Zimmerman. Program directors all had a question: Is Bobbie Gentry white or black? Zimmerman didn’t have an answer for them. “I hadn’t seen the picture!” he laughs. Gentry acknowledged the interest in her skin color diplomatically. “I don’t sing white or colored,” Gentry said. “I sing Southern.”13 “[Gentry] was the real deal,” sighs Zimmerman. “[It] was just a great record, it didn’t require a lot of favors to get it played, and that’s tough: radio that’s easy.” Capitol execs didn’t want to lose momentum. They scheduled Gentry studio time to record a full follow-up LP right away.

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 70

 70 •

27/10/2014 16:06

8

Capitol Pre-orders Five Times as Many Records as Meet the Beatles

The first recording sessions for Ode to Billie Joe the LP took place at Capitol Studios on July 27 and 28. Gentry had already recorded the vocal and the guitar tracks, so Capitol mostly had to arrange overdubs or “sweetening sessions” as they called them.1 On the first day of recording, Gentry and session players recorded overdubs for “Lazy Willie,” “Chickasaw County Child,” and “Bugs.” The following day, they got “Sunday Best” and “Hurry, Tuesday Child” down in one three-hour evening session. As was customary at the time, the musicians are not credited on the album. Archived union contracts list players hired for the session: Carl Nashan, George Fields on harmonica and harp, Harold Diner, James Burton, Norman Serkin, Joseph Saxon on cello and bass, Ralph Schaeffer, Dale Anderson on kettledrums, William Kurasch, Jack Sheldon, the great Earl •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 71

 71 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Palmer on drums, Barrett O’Hara, and once again, Mike Deasy on guitar, and Jesse Ehrlich on bass. Listeners who loved “Ode to Billie Joe” were in for a surprise when the album opened with “Mississippi Delta,” the sonic opposite of “Ode.” But they got to hear Gentry just as the execs at Capitol first did, a gravelvoiced foxy lady holding her own singing gritty, swampy blues rock. Gentry shows off her Southern bona fides here, with jibber-jabber about eating Johnny cake and apple pandowdy, and picking “scuppanongs” off the vine. (Scuppernongs are grapes that grow in the South.) Next comes “I Saw an Angel Die.” A chilled-out folksy love ballad, it’s the only hint that this record was released in the so-called Summer of Love (“it was sunshine everywhere, you were out of sight”). The pace picks back up in characteristic Gentry rhythm with “Chickasaw County Child.” Next we hear a dreamy-eyed love ballad called “Sunday Best.” Side one closes out with “Niki Hoeky,” the only cover on the album and a big hit for P. J. Proby earlier that year. Side two kicks off with the deceptively up-tempo “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You” and then slides into “Bugs,” a theatrical number that serves as an early glimpse into Gentry’s nerdy musical-theater sensibilities. When Gentry mentions black ants, a marching drum goes rat-a-tat, like when ants march across a picnic blanket in classic cartoons. When she sings of swatting away flies, we hear the sound of a rolled-up newspaper go thwack. “Bugs” is followed by “Hurry, Tuesday Child,” which opens up with a strum reminiscent of “Ode to Billie Joe.” A story-song about a character set in the South, “Lazy Willie” is classic Gentry, a number •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 72

 72 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

featuring finger-picked rhythm and horns. The album closes out, of course, with “Ode to Billie Joe.” If you listen carefully, in the transition from “Lazy Willie” to “Ode,” you can hear a significant change in the sound of the room. It gets bigger. The LP was scheduled to hit record stores Tuesday, August 22, 1967. Capitol Records pre-ordered 500,000 copies of Ode to Billie Joe. The order was, by far, the largest pre-release pressing of a debut album in the history of Capitol, crushing the previous record of 100,000 copies of Meet the Beatles in 1964.2 The day before the album was released, the single reached number one on the Billboard, Cashbox, and Record World charts,3 with sales exceeding 750,000.4 With half a million units to move, Capitol kicked their formidable promotions machine into high gear. Typically, the marketing team launched a promo plan 90 days before a record’s scheduled release; three months was just enough time to develop a publicity strategy, write and edit copy, shoot photographs, and print the promotional items sent to DJs and record stores. Capitol was not about to risk letting momentum stall, so the execs hatched an unprecedented multidepartment plan to rush manufacturing and promotions in order to have the album in stores less than a month after it was recorded.5 With no time to waste, Brown Meggs’s merchandising department swung into action: Press Chief Joe Price—who later claimed that he, not Jim Ford, or Pat Vegas, or Bobby Paris, was behind getting Gentry signed to Capitol—scribbled the bio and news releases. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 73

 73 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Ivor Associates was hired for additional publicity. Don Doughy prepped trade ads. Fred Rice designed store displays. Capitol President Stan Gortikov wrote a special, personal letter to the field staff, who were promised marketing materials in hand by August 21. Lew Marchese sent kits to Honolulu, Hawaii, where instead of “wriggling” for tourists, Bobbie Gentry would perform as an opening act for “The Beach Boys Summer Spectacular” August 22 and 23.6 “Bobbie Gentry typifies what the record business is all about,” Brown Meggs said at the time. “It’s like she was born fully developed artistically. It looks like she’ll have a gold LP on her first release. With the exception of the Beatles, it’s never happened before with an unknown artist.”7 By September, Ode to Billie Joe knocked Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band out of the top slot. As the single swept the Hot 100, R&B, country, and easy listening singles charts, the album landed on Top LP and country album charts.8 The magnificent production rush job did result in one major error: The song order on my record doesn’t match the track listing printed on the vinyl sleeve. At first, I couldn’t remember where I got my record, and thought if I bought it second-hand, it was possible that the record was slipped into the wrong jacket. But the mis-match is reflected on almost every record I’ve come across. On the record jacket, side one opens with “Lazy Willie” and ends with “Mississippi Delta,” and side two opens with “Ode to Billie Joe” and ends with “Bugs.” (Also, though “Papa, Won’t You Let Me Go to Town With You?” is the title printed in the official songbook published by Larry Shayne Music, Inc., the song is called •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 74

 74 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

“Papa, Won’t You Take Me to Town With You?” on the jacket, and “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You” on the wax.) Seems no one ever remarked on it. To get their beautiful new star in front of DJs and reporters, Capitol sent Gentry on a 21-day, 11-city tour that included New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia.9 Vice President general manager Bob York tapped an up-and-coming executive for the enviable job of accompanying Gentry on the road. “I was called upstairs,” says Ken Mansfield, on the phone from Los Angeles. “They said, ‘We want you to take this girl on tour.’ ” There was one problem, though: Mansfield didn’t much care for “Ode to Billie Joe.” “For one thing, it was too long,” says Mansfield. “These were the days of having a short record to get a hit. Even if it had to be cut down, it was still a very long record and a new artist. It [just] wasn’t the typical kind of record that were making hits in those days.” Plus, he thought it was boring. “It was this girl and a guitar and of course [there were] strings on it.” I can practically hear Mansfield shrug through the phone. “I don’t know. I really wasn’t into doing it.” York, however, told him in no uncertain terms: We really believe in this. Mansfield was an ambitious kid with big plans that included climbing to the top of the tower; he couldn’t exactly say no to his boss, even if he did find the urgency in York’s voice unsettling. “I’m not really sure where the pressure came from to [market] quite so drastically … even though Bob was in charge of my department, he wasn’t heavily involved in promotion, or •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 75

 75 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

even an A&R-related person. He was more of a general manager,” says Mansfield. “If I had to guess, [the heat] was probably from Kelly Gordon,” says Mansfield. “Producers had a lot of power in those days. They [were] the ones who made the record, and they had a lot to say about what we did, informally.” Mansfield had orders to get cracking immediately. The tour was thrown together so quickly—visits to radio stations, interviews with journalists, cocktail parties, performances—that Mansfield didn’t even meet Gentry until they both showed up with their bags at LAX. “So we get on the road,” says Mansfield, “and this thing started exploding. I’d never seen anything like this.” The tour marked Gentry’s arrival as one of the biggest stars in the country. Though he didn’t expect it at the time, the trip changed Mansfield’s life, too. Mansfield laughs when he recalls Bobbie Gentry before fortune and fame. “I guess it was ‘Bobbie the poor struggling artist,’ ” he says. “It’s hard for me to imagine saying that about Bobbie, not having the money, because she turned out to be so wealthy and successful.” If Gentry could have afforded it, she would’ve had a fashionable wardrobe. She loved fashion, textiles, and costumes, and could sketch clothing designs as well as any professional. During the Vegas years, she designed the costumes for her shows. In fact, fashion design was one of her fallbacks: She once told Jimmie Haskell that if she couldn’t make money with her music, she planned to design and sell a line of simple burlap dresses. In 1970, she told writer Marian Christy (“the literary Oprah Winfrey”) that she planned to launch a fashion collection based on her self-designed wardrobe. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 76

 76 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

In the fall of 1967, though, Gentry only had one nice go-to dress. Jess Rand, Gentry’s first manager, remembers it as that lousy yellow dress. Retired now, Jess Rand is a legendary music industry heavyweight best known for managing Sammy Davis, Jr., Sam Cooke and The Lettermen. In the late 1960s, Rand was in with Capitol executives, who hooked him up with Gentry. (Ken Mansfield remembers calling Rand to bring him on board with Gentry, but Rand doesn’t remember it that way.) They both accompanied Gentry on her first promotional tour. “We stayed in New York, we drove to New Jersey, we drove to Washington, DC,” recalls Rand. “And when I say drove, we were chauffeured. And she was always in this yellow dress!” First stop: New York City. Reporters, DJs, and photographers clamored for the chance to meet and photograph the beautiful new star. In New York, Gentry was hired as a spokesmodel for Paraphernalia, a hip line of affordable mod party clothes—think a cooler, paisley, and bell-sleeved H&M—featuring dresses by a brand-new designer named Betsey Johnson. As a stunning beauty with the biggest song in the country, Bobbie Gentry was the toast of the town. Paraphernalia threw her a party at Le Club. Rand and Mansfield threw her another one at the Americana Hotel. Magazine photographers trailed behind her as she strolled through Gramercy Park. While dining at hot spot Danny’s Hideaway, Gentry signed her first management contract, with Jess Rand. The date was August 6, 1967— Rand can remember the exact date, because it’s his wife’s birthday, and he felt bad not spending it with her. But Bobbie Gentry was big business. “We signed our original contract on the back of a napkin,” says Rand. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 77

 77 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Bobbie Gentry and Jess Rand, her first manager. They signed their contract on a napkin at Danny’s Hideaway in New York City. From the Jess Rand Collection, printed with permission

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 78

 78 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

While out east, Gentry made her network debut on The Tonight Show. Johnny Carson introduced Gentry by holding up the LP for the audience. “Here’s an album that I understand is not even out yet,” he says. “But the title song, ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’ is the biggest, the top-selling single record in the United States today.” The camera cut to Bobbie sitting daintily, her legs crossed, a guitar on her lap. Sporting a bright floral mini-dress, prim heels, and feathery false eyelashes, she performed a mesmerizing rendition of “Ode to Billie Joe,” singing just a heartbeat slower than the recorded track, weaving in extended pauses before lines like, “But it don’t seem right.” Gentry played the song’s drama to the hilt, casting her eyes down at the floor and then dropping her head as the final F7 rang out. Carson is visibly floored. “If she doesn’t become a big star,” he said, “something’s wrong somewhere. She is great. You’re going to be hearing a lot from her.” Gentry also sang “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You,” delivered with an up-tempo energy that failed to snuff out the song’s intrinsic sadness. She sang with a big fake smile, sweeping her head back and forth like Cher. It’s a persona we don’t see Gentry try on again. After a wildly successful stint in New York, Jess Rand and Ken Mansfield had already switched gears from promoting to protecting Gentry by the time they arrived in Philadelphia. An altercation over a possible appearance on a show hosted by DJ Hy Lit of WKBS-TV almost led to fisticuffs. According to Rand, Hy Lit wanted Gentry to perform for free while charging a cover fee. “ ‘I said, no way.’ He said, ‘Why? Everybody does this!’ I said, ‘No, everybody doesn’t, [and besides] I’m not going to start a precedent.’ ” •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 79

 79 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Amid the whirlwind, what Mansfield remembers most is having a ball with Gentry, riding around in the back of limousines, singing along out loud with the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love,” the song that “Ode to Billie Joe” knocked out of the top spot. Though they didn’t stay in contact after the trip—he left Capitol to head up Apple Industries for the Beatles—Mansfield looks back on those days fondly. Jess Rand’s emotions are a little more mixed. By the time they headed back to Los Angeles, Rand and Gentry’s relationship was thinner than the napkin that solidified their deal. “I always knew it would never last,” Rand tells me. “Because at first she didn’t want to sign a contract, and I thought anything you could say to me orally, you could certainly put it in writing.” Besides the business matters, Rand and Gentry didn’t hit it off personally as well as Mansfield and Gentry. Rand sounds annoyed while recounting how he watched her “become more and more Southern” as the days passed. He puts on “Bobbie voice” the way everybody does it: very breathy and feminine, with a theatrically slow drawl. “We’re in a restaurant [and it’s], ‘You have butter beans? Do you have grits?’ ” Rand felt Gentry ignored him. “I’m watching her get more withdrawn [from] Kenny and myself than you can imagine, but Kenny works for Capitol, so he can’t get as angry as I can if you know what I mean.” On the plane ride back to Los Angeles, they didn’t speak at all. But then, Rand says, Gentry slipped him a note as she got off the plane. “A four line little poem she wrote, to me, telling me how hard it is to handle success.” Rand still has it tucked away some place. He also has photographs he took while on the trip. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 80

 80 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

In a photo Rand snapped of Gentry while they were in Philadelphia, she’s wearing that lousy yellow dress, which, frankly, doesn’t look so lousy on her. Her face is fresh, not covered up with pancake makeup. She looks so young. Leaning against a wall with a hand folded on her hip, she appears confident, ready for anything. Rand says Gentry sent lawyers to his office to dissolve their contract before the six months were up. Mansfield, meanwhile, returned from the trip on top of the world. He had a great time, and accomplished his mission: “Ode to Billie Joe” was the number one record in the country. All these years later, he also credits that trip with Gentry for giving him the inspiration that carried him into his legendary career with the Beatles. “[Bobbie Gentry] changed my life and business philosophy,” Mansfield told me. What he means is: Gentry turned him on to Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. “I totally took that business philosophy and really ran with it,” he says. “I left it later on, but at the time it gave me a model. And here she was a country girl, I guess, and I guess kind of quiet, and it was a way for her to deal. And I was a country boy trying to make things happen. You know, a poor country boy trying to make it in the big city.” While on tour, Mansfield and Gentry were so into Rand (Ayn, not Jess) that Mansfield left messages at the hotel for her using the code name “John Galt,” hero of Atlas Shrugged. And Gentry went by “Dagny,” a reference to Dagny Taggart. Gentry did, after all, study philosophy at UCLA in the mid-1960s. As Mansfield said, he moved on. In fact, he’s now a well-regarded Christian speaker, though he still writes books about his life in rock ’n’ roll.10 •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 81

 81 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

Bobbie Gentry wearing “that lousy yellow dress” while visiting Philadelphia on her first East Coast tour, 1967. Photo from the Jess Rand Collection, printed with permission

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 82

 82 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

When Gentry landed back in Los Angeles, she taped a string of television appearances. One of the most memorable is her performance on the controversial Season 2 premiere11 of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” The episode is infamous TV history because it featured Pete Seeger in his first network appearance since he was blacklisted after appearing in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955. Gentry was invited to sing “Ode to Billie Joe” on that particular episode to serve as “an obvious bridge between Seeger’s folk purism and the new genre known as folk rock.”12 That evening, Seeger debuted “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy,” a song he wrote that was inspired by a photograph of American troops slogging through the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. CBS deemed it too controversial, and they cut it out of the broadcast. Gentry’s performance of “Ode to Billie Joe” that night is the one that Jill Sobule watched on television as a kid. The camera pans down, and we see a small round kitchen table in a darkened living room. Seated at the table are three creepy mannequins sculpted from white plaster: a mother, a father, and an older boy— representing the brother who was bailin’ hay with the song’s narrator before they walked back to the house to eat. A spotlight glows on the mannequins, who are positioned so that they face an empty chair. Instead of sitting in the chair, Bobbie is perched on a window sill in front of the scene. She plucks her parlor guitar and sings “Ode to Billie Joe” with a steely, stoic resolve. As Gentry sings that “Mama said it was a shame about Billie Joe anyhow,” the camera closes in on Gentry, so that the only part of the mannequin arrangement that’s visible is •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 83

 83 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

the mother figure, hand frozen, clutching air. As she sings of something being thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, Gentry gazes directly into the camera. Strings make a sickly stirring sound as the scene tightens on the mannequins: father’s worn face, mother’s empty eyes. After she plucks the last chord, Gentry places the guitar down, turns around, and walks toward the mannequins. The scene ends with her sitting down at the table, dutifully returning to the kind charade. Gentry also performed “Niki Hoeky” on the same episode. It’s a scene that still leaves me wondering how much better life could be. In a frilly, bright orange crop top and bell-bottoms, Gentry snaps her fingers as she swaggers through a gauntlet of dancers. Pretty girls and shirtless, tight-panted hairless boy-men drop to their knees and play pattycake, then rattle their shoulders way back as Gentry struts on by, pop culture’s raven-haired answer to Ann-Margret. Every once in a while, Jess Rand likes to send old clients and friends a little reminder of the good old days. A few years ago, he found that photo of Gentry in the yellow dress and decided to mail her a copy. When Norma Deloris Egstrom of North Dakota—that’s Peggy Lee to me and you—was struggling with her health, Rand sent her a photo he snapped of her and actor Dick Haynes, and she thought it was a gas. Around 2010, Rand called Gentry. “I told her about this picture, and I said, ‘If I send you two copies, one for you, would you return the other one for me signed?’ She said, ‘Of course I would.’ ” Rand mailed her the photo, then never heard back.

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 84

 84 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Chickasaw County Declares Bobbie Gentry Day Even an admitted workaholic like Gentry needs a break sometimes. After the junket and taping a slew of television appearances, Gentry headed to her grandparents’ farm in Mississippi for some rest. She dropped 17 pounds from her already tiny frame during the promotional tour. The locals, however, had other ideas. From the moment a man named Robin Mathis played “Ode to Billie Joe” on WCPC in Houston, Mississippi, the station he built with his brothers in 1955, he was enchanted. Mathis was proud of a song that named the local landmarks. His chest only swelled bigger when he realized that the singer was the little girl he once knew as Bobbie Streeter, Maude and Harvey’s granddaughter. “I knew it was from somebody around here,” Mathis tells on the phone from his home, still in Houston, Mississippi. “I just didn’t make the connection.” Mathis thought the world of Bobbie’s grandparents. “They were wonderful people, lovable people,” he says. Though fans celebrate “Bobbie Gentry Day” the third of every June because of the first line of “Ode to Billie Joe,” Mathis didn’t want to wait that long. “She was from Chickasaw County, and we wanted her to come home and celebrate with us,” says Mathis, who declared September 30, 1967 Bobbie Gentry Day. The day was a success. An estimated 5,000 people converged on the Houston town square to catch a glimpse of the fancy woman who enjoyed herself some Johnny cake and watched pictures at the Carroll County picture show. Distant family drove to Houston to earn bragging •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 85

 85 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

rights while they still had the chance. “We wanted to see her before her fame closes in on her,” Mrs. K. M. Streeter of Painton, Gentry’s cousin-in-law, told a reporter at the time. “Pretty soon only her immediate family is going to be able to get near her—they’re going to have to close ranks sometime.”13 As they drove toward Houston, travelers entered a Gentry bubble. Radio stations played only Gentry songs and ran interview clips every few minutes. Five thousand people clustered into the town square, where the local high school band played songs from Ode to Billie Joe. When Gentry finally appeared, she donned a blue dress from Dendy’s department Store in Houston, given to her gratis because of the line “There’s a blue dress at Dendy’s” in “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You” Locals enjoyed watching Bobbie imitate the art that imitated the life they knew in Chickasaw County. They also fully expected Gentry to clarify the official locations of the places she had been singing about on the radio. Newspapers reported that she would be “pulling back the veil” on “Ode to Billie Joe.” They wondered which Tallahatchie Bridge and which Choctaw Ridge appeared in the song. The land was originally settled by the Choctaw Indians; Gentry could have been singing about any one of the ridges locals suddenly renamed “Choctaw Ridge” after the song came out. On her visit, Gentry confirmed that the Choctaw Ridge in “Ode to Billie Joe” is the one she could see from her daddy’s farm in Greenwood. In a spread in Life magazine, Gentry is pictured walking over a bridge that crossed the Tallahatchie River at, poetically enough, Money, Mississippi, approximately 10 miles north of Greenwood. “This is what I had in mind,” she •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 86

 86 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

said. “The river isn’t very deep here, but the current is strong.”14 It collapsed in 1972. Before leaving Mississippi to head back to California again, Gentry asked Mathis to help her send gifts to the local children. In schools across the region, kids were called to the gymnasium, where they were given a moon pie, a six-ounce Coca-Cola, and a gold fountain pen. As they enjoyed their treats, the children sat and listened to the song about a boy killing himself. “From then on,” wrote one of those children in a memoir about growing up in Mississippi, “I thought about that nice famous lady who cared enough about us to give us something without wanting anything in return.”15

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 87

 87 •

27/10/2014 16:06

9

The Capitol Years

After the wild success of Ode to Billie Joe, Capitol was understandably eager to issue a follow-up record. Released in March, 1968, The Delta Sweete is a concept album about life in the South. The first track, “Okolona River Bottom Band” kicks off the album with a man cackling—sounds like Kelly Gordon—then Gentry shimmies in with la-lala-las, promptly welcoming listeners to Chickasaw land. The covers are mostly well-worn Southern anthems: Mose Allison’s “Parchman Farm,” John D. Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road,” Doug Kershaw’s “Louisiana Man,” and Luther Dixon and Al Smith’s “Big Boss Man.” “Reunion” is reminiscent of “Bugs,” a musical-theater snippet of scat-talk on top of a hambone beat. “Morning Glory” is a sexy, drowsy number that one fan memorably described on a message board as “an ode to morning wood.” On The Delta Sweete, Gentry directly expressed the fascination with charade and illusion she explored more subtly in “Ode to Billie Joe.” If the first side features songs overtly about the South, the originals on the •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 88

 88 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

second side mark Gentry’s shift into literary existential ennui that eventually dominated her later work. “Penduli Pendulum,” for example, is a creepy little ditty that feels like a woozy carousel ride, with Gentry singing lines like “there I go, here I come.” “Goodbye,” she sings, serves as her “one amusement.” Though her Southern Gothic lyrics are more often compared to Faulkner, they remind me of Eudora Welty’s short stories, deep dives into the absurdity of the beloved conventions that simultaneously hold society together and push individual people apart. In “Ode to Billie Joe,” the Southern manners that pull the family together at supper is the same mechanism driving them apart. Being polite is more important than being known. “A lot of people have asked me if ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ was a true story and of course they wanted to know what was thrown off the bridge,” Gentry said in 1975. “They seemed to think that was the message or the story that I was trying to tell. Actually the story pointed out the particular way that people here in the South deal with the very real things in life, birth and death and tragedy.”1 In “Courtyard,” Gentry sings from the point of view of a woman imprisoned by empty promises. As the song ends, bright notes dull then darken into a drone as Gentry laments, “patterns on a courtyard floor, illusions, of all I’m living for.” The most striking song on The Delta Sweete, though, is the psychedelic meditation “Refractions.” Gentry sings of a “distressing dream” where she’s a crystal bird caught in perpetual flight. The narrator discovers she has been encased in glass. By the end of the song, heart racing, she wakes up, “released from the prism at last.” •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 89

 89 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

The Delta Sweete, of course, didn’t live up to the stratospheric sales of Ode to Billie Joe. “No one bought it but I didn’t lose any sleep over it,” Gentry said at the time. “I’ve never tried to pre-judge public taste.” Capitol issued follow-up albums in quick succession. Later that same year, Capitol released Local Gentry, also produced by Gordon but arranged by Perry Botkin, Jr. and Shorty Rogers. Then Capitol paired Gentry with Glen Campbell, her handsome brother-in-arms in pop-country crossover, for Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell. The album charted three hits and went gold, though the only Gentry-penned tune on the album was “Mornin’ Glory” from The Delta Sweete, adapted to a duet. Despite the new records, non-stop performances, and television appearances, competing in the San Remo Song Festival in Italy alongside Louis Armstrong and Wilson Pickett, and hosting her BBC show, the American press noted “you didn’t hear much from her in 1968.”2 Gentry didn’t seem too worried about it. “If I were just a performer, and not a writer, I might have felt more insecure about the whole thing,” Gentry said in 1969. “After ‘Billie Joe,’ I was faced with the decision of whether to capitalize on the 3,000,000 records it sold by writing follow-ups that sounded the same. I decided not to. I felt I had made my statement with ‘Ode to Billie Joe.’ I’m a writer with a writer’s integrity, and I didn’t want to follow it up with parodies.”3 It must’ve been tempting to follow the formula: “Ode to Billie Joe” earned the most Grammy nominations that year, ten in all. Gentry personally won Best Vocal Performance, Best Contemporary Female Solo Vocal Performance, and Best New Artist, becoming the first “country” artist to do so. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 90

 90 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

In 1969, Gentry recorded in Nashville, then Muscle Shoals. The Nashville recording sessions resulted in Touch ’Em With Love. Produced by Kelso Herston, it featured mostly covers, including Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” which became a number one hit in the UK. Then Gentry headed to Muscle Shoals to make Fancy, with legendary producer Rick Hall at the helm.4 Hall wanted to produce a Bobbie Gentry record since he almost crashed into a telephone pole the first time he heard “Ode.” He calls her “the female Elvis Presley.” “I offered to produce her,” Hall said. “She asked me what she should do, because she wanted for me to be her producer. I said, ‘Write me another ‘Ode to Billie Joe.’ She said she’d do the best she could.”5 Ads for the album teased, “What happens when a country girl goes to Muscle Shoals? She gets … Fancy. And she gets her biggest and best album yet.” We also get a song with the closest thing to a political statement Gentry seems willing to make through song. “ ‘Fancy’ is my strongest statement for women’s lib, if you really listen to it,” Gentry said in 1974. “I agree wholeheartedly with that movement and all the serious issues that they stand for—equality, equal pay, day care centers, and abortion rights.”6 By the time Fancy was released in 1970, however, some reporters seemed less interested in the politics of Gentry’s tale of an unapologetic courtesan than Gentry’s personal life. In December, 1969, Gentry married a Nevada casino mogul 31 years her senior. Reporters covered Gentry’s nuptials to Bill Harrah with an air of amusement that erupted into nasty glee when the •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 91

 91 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

couple released a statement, only four months after the wedding, that announced an impending divorce. They noted the former couple had reached “an amicable settlement,” though there would be no alimony or property exchange. Sources have suggested that part of the problem with Harrah, like other potential partners, was that he had expected Gentry to slow down her career after getting married. While they remained friends, never spoke badly of one another, and continued a professional relationship, the quickie marriage and divorce hurt Gentry’s reputation. A longtime Las Vegasbased entertainment writer told me that after the divorce announcement, Reno and Tahoe tour guides would crack crude jokes about how much money she earned per hour married to Harrah in front of guests. Released in 1971, Patchwork was Gentry’s last album on Capitol Records. Whether she intended to leave the music industry at that time or not, it feels like a grand, final statement. More Dory Previn than Dolly Parton, Patchwork is a full music-theater-style exploration of characters and caricature, and Gentry considered it her finest achievement. Perhaps not coincidentally, it was the first one where she received full producer credit. After so many observational songs chronicling other people’s lives, Gentry’s last song is an autobiographical meditation titled “Lookin’ In.” She sang, “So I’m packin’ up and I’m checkin’ out,” and told fans “I just can’t bring myself to compromise.”

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 92

 92 •

27/10/2014 16:06

10

Viva Las Vegas

After leaving Capitol Records, Gentry poured her considerable energy into increasingly lavish stage productions that she took to stages in Las Vegas, Reno, Canada, and Sydney, Australia. In 1971, she revamped her act, winning the respect of critics who were initially reluctant to embrace her as a multidisciplinary artist with a wider range than evident on her early records. “It wasn’t too long ago that Bobbie Gentry was poking along in an Ole Miss format based upon her one big hit single, ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’ and a few derivatives about her Chickasaw County,” noted a Variety scribe. “The entire Gentry ambience has changed almost completely.”1 The hallmark of Bobbie Gentry shows was that they were completely, ridiculously, awesomely over the top. In the show “Diamonds by Tiffany, Jeans by Levi Strauss,” Gentry performed “Ode” in a cropped top and judiciously unbuttoned jeans, but the real gag was that genuine million-dollar Tiffany diamonds would be ceremoniously sewn onto her jeans and denim jacket •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 93

 93 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

every night. “It was a big deal before the show,” recalls choreographer Donald Bradburn, who worked closely with Gentry throughout the Vegas years. “People would come and watch the security guys come and take them out of the vault and bring them backstage, [where] they would be sewn onto Bobbie’s jeans.” The 1970s were a heady time: The Smithsonian requested a pair of her jeans for their permanent collection.2 Throughout 1971 and 1972, Gentry worked on her stage show non-stop, slowing down only when forced, like when she fractured her nose running into stage equipment during a frenzied off-stage costume change. Her devotion was paying off: In 1972, she broke the showroom attendance record at the Landmark, previously held by Texas crooner and sausage king Jimmy Dean.3 Gentry’s ability to draw consistent crowds landed her bigger contracts in better showrooms. She always negotiated her own deals, even though it was unusual at the time for a celebrity to talk business on their own behalf, and it was almost unheard of for a woman to do it. Despite her association with Harrah, Gentry was rising rapidly through the Howard Hughes organization. “Bobbie Gentry is one of the better ideas … by the Hughes organization,” a writer in Variety noted. “She began moving upward at the Landmark, went on to the Desert Inn and now has a month in the Frontier’s Music Hall in which to display her protean talent.”4 By now, critics were effusive about her “husky vocalistics,” and “impressive élan” while dancing; her signature swivel was dubbed “the Gentry strut.” By 1974, Gentry was the undisputed queen of the Vegas strip. She hosted that year’s annual Las Vegas Awards, •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 94

 94 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

and commanded and received top money in both Vegas and Tahoe, where she had an open invitation to perform.5 “I look back on our shows, production value-wise, and our shows were like … an elaborate Broadway musical, with heavy design and lots of costumes,” said Bradburn. “It was an hour and 20 minutes of high-class musical theater.” In 1976, the Hughes organization hired Bobbie Gentry to work for 16 weeks over the course of the next two years for a cool $2 million.6 While so many profiles of Gentry written by male entertainment writers laughably framed her success as an unexpected burden, Boston Globe columnist Marian Christy’s profile captured Bobbie’s unflinching business sense and ambition. Christy called Gentry an iron butterfly. “Bobbie, a Baptist, is made of iron—singleminded, seemingly unbreakable, projecting chilling inner strength. She’s also disarmingly honest,” wrote Christy.7 Gentry told Christy, “Success is recognition and an open channel for creative energies. But I’m tired of hearing artists say they don’t perform for money. Fame without fortune is empty.” Christy was known for quoting her subjects at length, developing a sort of oral history of celebrities and the zeitgeist: “[Gentry] enunciates her aims by talking about the intoxication of forging ahead, gaining momentum, clicking financially. She steers clear of the dumb-broad image usually linked to sexpot stars. Bobbie wants you to understand that she’s infused with executive dynamics and capable of running the show. She’s the boss lady behind her Los Angeles-based music publishing company, Gentry, Ltd. Not one memo, not •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 95

 95 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

one letter, not one important telephone call gets by without her personal approval.”8 Although Gentry was clearly in charge, she wasn’t afraid to delegate. She hired creatives she trusted and gave them space to work. “There were segments throughout the show that were pure dance,” Bradburn says. “I’d say, ‘Bobbie, do you think this will be too distracting?’ And she’d say, ‘No, they’ll be looking at me.’ Which was great.” While proving herself on the stage-show circuit, as always, Gentry began planning her next moves. In 1973, she signed a long-term partnership contract with her personal manager Jim Wasson. Wasson agreed to focus solely on Gentry’s career, which they anticipated would include club acts, motion pictures, television appearances, and music publishing. That spring, as Gentry prepared for another three-week engagement at the Desert Inn, they moved Gentry Ltd. into a larger office space at 9229 Sunset Blvd.9 They formed Woodbine Projects, Inc. as a parent company; Gentry would run Gentry Ltd. as a subsidiary. Variety reported: “Gentry Ltd. heretofore had devoted most of its efforts to musical output, but under the new banner of Woodbine Projects a program of diversification, including motion picture and TV production and other theatrical activities, will be launched.”10 Within weeks of establishing Woodbine, Gentry was in talks with the attorney representing the estate of David O. Selznick, the legendary producer best known for A Star is Born, Little Women, and, of course, Gone With the Wind. He had also, perhaps not coincidentally, produced Ruby Gentry and married Jennifer Jones, the actress who played the titular part that had inspired Gentry’s stage name. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 96

 96 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Gentry must have felt a sense of coming full circle. In the decade or so since Roberta Lee Streeter christened herself Bobbie Gentry, she had grown into her name’s destiny: She was a savvy investor, building sustainable wealth while methodically working her way up from hula dancer to an international star managing milliondollar stage productions. Next, she would produce and direct television and film. In 1973, she met with the Selznick’s estate attorney to negotiate “The Divine Sarah,” a screenplay written by Ben Hecht. The storyline will be familiar to anyone who has seen Ruby Gentry or heard “Fancy”: The script was based on the life of Sarah Bernhardt, illegitimate daughter of a Dutch courtesan who went on to become the most famous actress in the world.11 While planning the future, though, Gentry was still spending most nights under the bright spotlights starring in relentlessly baroque productions that aggressively celebrated the best of Vegas artifice: Gentry shows featured dragon-shaped chariots that huffed smoke, clouds bursting into on-stage rainstorms, and an elevator trap-door that enabled her to vanish, then resurrect from beneath the floor inside a towering, spinning neon birdcage. In Vegas, there was no confusion over whether Bobbie Gentry was a folk-rock singer, or a country star or a pop composer. Even from the cheap seats, the razzle-dazzle made it clear that Bobbie Gentry was an entertainer. The most famous Gentry stage performance of the Vegas era is one that most fans haven’t seen, but discuss feverishly: the Bobbie Gentry tribute to Elvis Presley. •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 97

 97 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

During my research, I discovered reels of never-beforeseen Super 8 video of Gentry performing in Las Vegas, and purchased them.12 Unlike L-P Anderson’s fruitless search through Jim Ford’s tapes for an early demo of “Ode to Billie Joe,” my batch of mystery tapes delivered the goods. Bobbie Gentry swaggers out onto stage in a tight white sequin suit, jutting one knee out to the side and coyly glancing at the audience as the orchestra erupts into “Jailhouse Rock.” Gentry hunches forward, her legs wobbling like rubber bands. She executes several roundhouse karate kicks in time with thick thumps of bass. Her lips pull back into an Elvis snarl, but they don’t quite conceal the good time she’s having. Her body freezes, poised in Elvis stance. She swivels her head back and forth, like get a load of this. The rattling starts at her ankles. When it reaches her hips, she plants a leg and begins sliding down until she is so close to the floor that she’s almost in a full cheerleader split. Slowly, she pulls at the silk scarf tied around her neck, and tosses it into the audience as she leaps in the air, and switches sides. The crowd goes berserk. She stands up, snaps her kneecaps together, shakes out a few more pelvis pumps, and windmills her arms. Meanwhile, the dancers are leaping into kangaroo jumps, one leg tucked underneath and the other shooting straight out, forming the shape of an arrow, like a human blinking neon sign flashing over and over again. The performance was the talk of Vegas. When Elvis heard about the spectacle he decided to check it out for himself. Gentry and Presley’s paths had almost crossed before they met in Vegas. In 1969, Gentry turned down the role •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 98

 98 •

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

of Charlene, a sort of sexy Norma Rae rabble-rouser, in the goofy Elvis vehicle The Trouble With Girls (and How to Get Into It).13 Bobbie Gentry was not interested in playing the part of a pretty Elvis Presley fan. Instead, she made Elvis Presley a handsome Bobbie Gentry fan. After the lights went down, Presley would sneak into Gentry’s show. He even urged his audience to go see her perform. “This young lady is a very fine singer. She’s opening at the Frontier Hotel on Thursday, Bobbie Gentry. She’s good folks, so go over and see her act. She’s a lot of woman, really.”14 Late night, after her show, Gentry would often head over to Elvis’s suite at the Hilton, where they hung out and sang songs all night, sometimes joined by Tom Jones and other friends in town. “Bobbie was one of the few other people who were invited into that thing,” Tom Jones has said.15 “We’d mostly sing gospel stuff. She was great-looking, fantastic, outspoken—but she was more like one of the guys, a star in her own right.” At the time, tabloid headlines screamed that Gentry and Elvis were having an affair. It got so bad that after Elvis was rushed to a Memphis hospital practically in a coma, he had to issue a statement to dispel rumors of a romance before working again: “Elvis Presley, who is now well enough to open at the Las Vegas Hilton in January, vows that his ‘real’ girlfriend is still Linda Thompson— not Bobbie Gentry, who is merely a friend.”16 By January, 1974, tabloids splashed their front covers with titles like, “Bobbie Gentry or Linda Thompson: Elvis Claims His Woman!” The March, 1974 issue of Screen Stories featured an image of Bobbie and Elvis clumsily superimposed into a frame together beneath the headline •

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 99

 99 •

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“Scoop! Elvis’ Hometown Wedding! The Girl! The Place! The Love Story of the Year!” On the cover of the May, 1974 edition of Movie Stars, an image of a baby was pasted onto a Elvis next to a doctored picture of a pregnant-looking Gentry with the headline “Bobbie Gentry to Have Elvis’ Son! How She Gave Him Back his Manhood.’ ” The faux-pregnancy was the final straw for Gentry, who at 32 did not yet have a child and who had been working hard to regain control of her image since the split with Harrah. Gentry sued the magazine for $2,000,000 in damages for defamation and invasion of privacy over the pregnancy story.17 It’s little wonder the idea of an affair between Bobbie Gentry and Elvis Presley fascinates fans. It seems almost sinful that the King and the Cajun Queen wouldn’t royally merge their assets, at least for a night. Who knows? Maybe two genetically superior native Mississippians who both happened to have re-invented American musical genres and found themselves together in a glitter galaxy in the middle of the desert were just friends, and only friends. What’s so hard to believe about that? While controlling publicity is about putting out fires, managing a multi-faceted stage production is about lighting them under everyone else’s ass—something Gentry’s former employees say she was not afraid to do. “It was a combination of working with John Lennon and George Martin,” recalls Roger Douglas, a musician who led Gentry’s back-up band from 1974 to 1978. Douglas says that a few fellow band mates had problems taking orders from a sexy boss lady. “She’s an overpowering  100 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 100

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

Bobbie Gentry sued Movie Stars magazine for defamation in response to this magazine story, that claimed she was pregnant with Elvis’s child

 101 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 101

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

presence, with her beauty and talent and smarts,” says Douglas, “not like some swamp nympho or something, [but] sometimes the guys would get that impression from all the makeup and the tight clothes and the huge hair … [but] if you expected that, you were going to get your senses re-arranged.” Douglas says it was, in part, a cultural problem. Gentry liked to hire rock bands as the nucleus of her stage band, but elaborate stage productions run differently than regular rock and roll shows. Choreographer Don Bradburn says the discord was also a matter of plain old sexism and double standards. Before working with Gentry, Bradburn worked on Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand. He likens the way some men on set saw Gentry with what he witnessed happen to Streisand. “[Barbra Streisand] got the reputation for being a diva and a queen bitch, all these things. I was around on the set, and I know for a fact that she was not like that,” says Bradburn. “She was a strong personality, obviously, and it was her first film, so she tended to ask questions like, ‘Will that light be right for me?’ And of course those guys, especially at that time, were the old-guard union crew tech people and they didn’t want to take advice or questions from this upstart whippersnapper young lady. So that’s where all that came from.” Four decades later, female pop stars are still talking about the same old problem. My conversations with Gentry’s old colleagues about her bitch-boss problem reminds of the scene in the documentary My Time Now, where Nicki Minaj explains “bossing up.” You have to be a beast. That’s the only way they respect you. I came up under Wayne and Wayne has his way of  102 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 102

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

doing things. When Wayne walks up on the motherfuckin’ stage and says, “Don’t talk to me, have my fucking music ready, get the fuck up out of my face, I’mma blow this—in your—face all day,” it’s cool. But every time I, every time I put my foot down and stand up for myself, it’s like “We’ve heard about Nicki Minaj! Nicki Minaj shut down a photo shoot! Oh my god! No one wants to work with Nicki Minaa-a—a—aaj! … When I am assertive, I’m a bitch. When a man is assertive, he’s a boss. He bossed up. No negative connotation.’

Roger Douglas admits that initially, he was intimidated by the way Gentry bossed up, too. She didn’t let her players rely on sheet music. You best know your parts cold, and you did not want to be called on the carpet for slacking off. One time Gentry asked Douglas if he knew how to play banjo. Banjo? Of course he played banjo! The problem was he didn’t play banjo. “I went home that day and bought one,” laughs Douglas. “And I learned how to play it just so I wouldn’t look like an idiot.” It paid off. Playing banjo helped Douglas land a coveted spot as a featured performer. Cut to Douglas and Gentry in matching white suits, seated at the front of the stage, scrubbing banjos side-by-side in an up-tempo Hello, Dolly! number. Gentry mixed classic numbers with more transgressive material. In a tribute to boogie-woogie vocal group the Andrews Sisters, Gentry and two male dancers performed while dolled up in 1940s military nursing uniforms. “When they first came on, they had the full wigs and the military uniforms, and then [the audience] would notice the hairy legs,” recalls Don Bradburn.  103 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 103

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“That was very unusual to be doing.” It seems inevitable that Gentry developed a big gay following “sort of like Bette Midler.” Bradburn recalls that Bobbie became such a darling of the “show boys” on the party circuit that many men dressed up like Bobbie at masquerade balls.

The Happiness Hour In the mid-1970s, Bobbie Gentry got her shot at American television. Gentry had been wanting to do television for years, actually. Back in 1969, she told a reporter that of all her creative endeavors, she liked TV best of all. “If you’re a performer who likes to do lots of things, it’s the best field for you. You can get involved in everything—from writing to set design to choreography.”18 In 1968, while American television executives still believed that a female performer wouldn’t attract enough viewers to keep advertisers happy,19 the BBC invited Gentry to “femcee” her own half-hour program.20 Produced by Stanley Dorfman, Gentry hosted guest stars like baby-faced Donovan, James Taylor, and Glen Campbell. Six years after hosting the BBC series, CBS executive Bob Templer caught one of her performances at the Desert Inn while the network happened to be searching for a series to replace The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour. Templer, blown away by the performance, sent a crew to tape the show so he could run it by his team. In June, 1974, CBS announced plans for the “Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour.” “I had almost given up on the idea of my own show,” Gentry said at the time. “It is something I have wanted,  104 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 104

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

and something I’ve waited for.”21 The Happiness Hour wasn’t a done deal, exactly. The plan was to tape and broadcast four episodes that would compete against three other shows for the precious open slot: “Tony Orlando and Dawn,” “The Hudson Brothers Show,” and a return of “Your Hit Parade.” Each show would run for one month, and then CBS would pick one to kick off the new year as a regular show. Gentry was aware the odds were against her. “It seems the networks haven’t exactly gone out of their way to give women their own variety shows,” admitted Gentry. “But even so, this business is about the only one I can think of where women, in most cases, usually have an opportunity to make as much money as men.”22 Gentry was interested in innovation, not imitation. She had to be—by the mid-1970s, the variety show format was already stale, appealing mostly to older audiences who didn’t attract advertising dollars. One of the ways she wanted to shake things up was a skit that featured a male centerfold every week, an idea that probably seemed tasteless by an industry that just a few years later aired Pink Lady and Jeff, a show whose main gag—and I mean that literally—was Japanese women in bikinis misunderstanding the words of a white male comedian. The “Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour” opens with Roger Douglas’s booming intro: “Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Bobbie Gentry!” The show features some of the sketches from her live shows, complete with her dancers, as well as solo numbers and interludes featuring Gentry talking to the audience. The first episode begins with Bobbie Gentry seated at the piano, telling the audience tales of her teenage  105 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 105

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

years in the 1950s before breaking into “Yesterday Once More” by the Carpenters. Next, we see a 1950s medley adapted from her stage show, featuring Bobbie singing in her Rizzo outfit. Surprisingly, the network allowed Gentry’s Elvis tribute. She emerges with short hair coiffed into a dangling spit curl, then sings “Heartbreak Hotel” before karate-kicking, snarling, and sliding through the rest of the Presley medley. She gets to sing just a snippet of “Fancy” before the screen dissolves into a gauzy montage. A comedy skit playfully mocks the audience’s expectations of feminists: Bobbie, playing a ditzy showgirl character named Dixie, says, “The Mississippi thanks ya!” The scene cuts to her blonde co-star dressed in a crisp white dress shirt, tie, and black Buddy Holly frames. “There’s something wrong here and I think the other women agree, it should be MIZZZ-issippi!” Like all 1970s variety shows, it’s all a little corny and surreal. “We didn’t get the gig,” sighs Roger Douglas. “It just didn’t translate onto the television screen, what she was doing … I don’t know why it didn’t work.” Part of the problem was tension between Gentry and the show’s producer. Douglas muses that producer Frank Peppiatt, co-creator of Hee-Haw, wanted too much of a slapstick hayseed vibe for Gentry’s taste. “He had a kind of hick, hillbilly angle to it,” says Douglas. “It was a little awkward.” There was a clash between Gentry’s style—drag tributes and songs about sex and suicide— and the Middle America target audience, as evidenced by the cornball family-friendly commercials. (“Tide was designed with children in mind!”) Like with “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,” the conservative  106 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 106

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

executives at CBS censored the show from on high. Of course, “Fancy” couldn’t be performed in its entirety, lest we hear about the mother who advised her young daughter to turn herself out to keep the baby from starving. Network executives watched rehearsals, and then sent notes pointing out which dancers needed a haircut. They let Gentry perform as Elvis, but they refused, at the last possible minute, to let the male dancers perform as the Andrews Sisters. Reviewers picked up on how the show sanitized Gentry’s creativity. “I don’t believe the ‘Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour,’ ” went one succinct review. “They’ve got to be kidding. There’s nothing one can do but send flowers and remember Bobbie as she was before CBS got her.”23 TV writer Morton Moss wasn’t impressed, either: “[Gentry] has considerably more vitality than this marshmallow façade.”24 When the Happiness Hour wasn’t picked up, Gentry turned her focus back to the stage. Once again, she had to build a new band. Most of the guys quit to pursue songwriting and chase record deals. Douglas says he wasn’t interested in all that, and he saw the band’s departure as an opportunity to build a new team with less drama. The new guys, though, bristled at Gentry’s direction just as much as the old ones, and Douglas once again found himself serving as a go-between. “They didn’t know how to act around her, you know, she’s tough,” sighs Douglas. He pauses. “Or they thought she was tough. I just thought she was a businesswoman trying to get the job done.” Seven years after “Ode to Billie Joe,” Gentry still sang it every night on stage, even though the rest of her show  107 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 107

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

continued to evolve and change. Instead of playing it as a finale, she performed it near the top of every show. In the early 1970s, she’d played the iconic parlor guitar while performing the song. By now, though, she refused. “For some reason, she didn’t want to be seen playing that guitar,” says Douglas. “I don’t know why.” Douglas would play the guitar off stage standing in the dark, while Gentry sang the song holding just a microphone on stage. Douglas says even though the audience couldn’t see what guitar he was playing, he had to use Gentry’s parlor Martin on “Ode to Billie Joe” for it to sound right, because it had a very specific resonance. While that’s true of many guitars, another reason it probably had unique sound is because of the way Gentry strung it. The “Ode to Billie Joe” guitar is a Martin 5-18. “It’s called a Terz,” explains Dick Boak, director of museum, archives, and special projects at C. F. Martin & Company. “Terz means ‘minor third above pitch.’ Little guitars, like mandolins, need to be strung at a tighter pitch three half-steps above pitch, so the bass string would be a G instead of an E.” But Gentry didn’t do it that way. She used standard tuning, which made the guitar louder, says Boak, and probably tougher to play. Though technically not correct, Boak suggests she may have tuned it this way to make the guitar work with her relatively low voice.25 As the years progressed, Gentry also changed the melody and phrasing of “Ode to Billie Joe” on stage. Give or take a dramatic pause—Gentry loved to let tension rise in a chord, then boomerang back to the vocal at the last possible moment—her early live performances of “Ode to Billie Joe” stayed true to the recording. But  108 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 108

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

by the mid-1970s, her live renditions sounded very different. The distorted phrasing feels almost hokey, in the vein of what we typically think of as Vegas lounge-lizard style, quick talk-sing phrasing punctuated by sustained soaring notes. It’s all about as Vegas as it can get. In context, though, Gentry’s performance is more David Bowie than Dean Martin: She’s deconstructing the song while performing it. This era of “Ode to Billie Joe” performances brings to mind a theory introduced to me by way of Philip Auslander, a Georgia-based writer and academic specializing in performance studies. In a manifesto26 arguing for performance analysis of pop musicians on stage, Auslander references a theory by rock critic Simon Frith that I found constructive when comparing Gentry’s Vegas-era performances of “Ode to Billie Joe” with her early network appearances. Frith has proposed that a musician’s stage performance is filtered through three layers, all of which are present simultaneously. Auslander’s summary of Frith goes something like this: We tend to perceive pop singers as personally expressive, that is, as if they are singing a song straight from the heart. Frith argues that in reality, musicians are performing through their person, their stage persona, and the character depicted by the song. He notes that the layers of person and persona, and the layers of persona and character, are more blurred for musicians whose work is autobiographical—or perceived to be autobiographical. When Madonna sang “Material Girl,” the performance came from Madonna Louise Ciccone as filtered through the Madonna persona, while playing the character of materialistic girl in the mid-1980s. That example is  109 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 109

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

particularly instructive since Madonna’s persona and her signature song’s character are not only blurred but conflated, and Madonna has since been referred to simply as “Material Girl” despite a slew of other hits. Pop musicians like Madonna—and country singers— succeed when they successfully conflate these layers. Auslander studies glam-rock because it is the opposite. Glam succeeds when the artist crowbars these layers apart, sometimes violently, as part of his or her overall artistic statement. Auslander notes the conflation of person, persona, and character happens more readily with female performers, which makes artists like Lady Gaga and songs like Beyoncé’s “Flawless” so fascinating as a brand of modern feminist glam pop. By ripping holes into the layers of person, persona, and character, the artist invites fans to observe the process of performance and the real-time manufacture of a pop star. This subverts the traditional pop ideal, which succeeds by seamlessly compressing person, persona, and character until they are indistinguishable—like “Ode to Billie Joe”-era Bobbie Gentry. When “Ode to Billie Joe” was released, Gentry, Capitol Records, fans, and the press colluded in varying degrees to strategically ignore her years in Palm Springs and Los Angeles, which helped blur the boundary between Roberta Lee Streeter and “Bobbie Gentry.” Meanwhile, editing out Sally Jane Ellison from “Ode to Billie Joe” in order to allow Gentry to inhabit the song’s character, coupled with Gentry’s artistic penchant for theatrical performance, blurred the boundaries between “Bobbie Gentry” and the nameless “Ode to Billie Joe” character at least as successfully as Madonna and the  110 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 110

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

“Material Girl.” The cumulative effect was that Gentry’s person, persona, and the song’s character were sealed. Gentry was complicit, of course. Perhaps, though, she thought the character would sell but not stick. Almost a decade later, Gentry was trying to pry those layers apart by refusing to appear with the iconic guitar on stage, distorting the song’s familiar phrasing, and explicitly telling the audience that “Ode to Billie Joe” is not a “true” story. In Vegas, Gentry explored the boundaries of the paradox of manufacturing authenticity. In 1976, when she finally had the opportunity to adapt the song to the big screen, she pushed those boundaries to the breaking point.

 111 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 111

27/10/2014 16:06

11

What the Song Didn’t Tell You, the Movie Will

In May, 1976, Gentry appeared on The Tonight Show to promote the film adaptation of “Ode to Billie Joe.”1 Gentry strode from curtain to couch in a cream pantsuit as Carson’s band droned a bluesy instrumental version of her trademark song. Johnny opened the conversation. “We were just talking, amongst us, about this song, being one of the all-time great marriages of lyrics and song, tune and everything. That doesn’t happen often in a performer’s life, does it? … where the material all works just perfect.” “No, it doesn’t,” replied Gentry. “And you know it came about in a strange way. I had written a song called “Mississippi Delta,” and produced a record, and taken that to Capitol. And they signed me as an artist and needed something for the flip side of it.” Johnny interjects. “Don’t tell me!”  112 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 112

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

“And they wanted something regional like ‘Mississippi Delta,’ ” Gentry replied. They banter a bit, and then Carson tosses Gentry the next softball. “That song is what they call the proverbial overnight success,” Carson says to Gentry. “Though there is no such thing as overnight success! Everybody puts in their dues, and then all of a sudden you come up with something like that, and they say, ‘Hey, where’s she been?’ ” “Yeah, that’s true,” replies Bobbie. “I know a lot of people think that I came directly from Mississippi, just out of a swamp fog and onto television. And actually, I’d been living in California since I was 13.” Carson asks Gentry if the song was autobiographical. “It’s a nebulous song,” he says. “You’re not exactly sure what happens.” Mid-conversation, Carson pivots to an obviously preconceived segue. “I’ve noticed a lot of times people have the three names.” “Oh, that’s very, very common,” replies Gentry in calm, dulcet tones. “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone this, but my name is Bobbie Lee Gentry.” This wasn’t actually news. But the faux-revelation served to draw Bobbie closer with the main character of the movie in the popular imagination: The film’s protagonist wasn’t Sally Jane Ellison. She was named Bobbie Lee Hartley. Max Baer, Jr. is best known for playing Jethro on The Beverly Hillbillies. After almost a decade starring in what Baer refers to in conversation only as “the series,” he  113 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 113

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

found himself typecast as a dullard. Unable to get acting work, Baer turned to directing films with his partner Roger Camras. It was Camras who connected Baer with Gentry, who he first met way back in 1963. “This was before she had any success as a performer,” Camras told me in a phone conversation. “[She was] just a friend of mine who lived next door, and once in a while I used to take her to the Whisky a Go Go.” Camras and Gentry lost contact, and then she became a star. He thought of his old friend while looking for a musician to write the theme song for Macon County Line. The first film co-produced by Baer and Camras, Macon County Line is a gritty indie film that traces a couple of drifters prone to trouble. Gentry agreed to write a song, but only if she liked the film. They invited her to a private preview. “She loved the movie,” recalls Camras. Gentry wrote the song “Another Day, Another Time” to play as the closing credits rolled. Macon County Line was very successful. In fact, it was the single highest earning film of 1974 in cost-to-gross ratio. Gentry asked Baer and Camras if they’d be interested in working on Ode to Billie Joe, and they agreed. Though Bobbie had long talked about writing a script, that job was assigned to Baer, and he couldn’t figure out the plot. After writing in circles, he caught Summer of ’42 on cable. A film based on a novel of the same name by Herman Raucher, Summer of ’42 traces a young boy’s horny journey befriending a sexy older woman whose husband is off fighting in World War II. Baer and Camras decided Raucher was the man for the job. It took some convincing; Raucher turned down the gig four times. “Baer was persuasive to the point of being  114 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 114

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

overbearing,” Raucher tells me on the phone from his home in Connecticut. “I said, ‘You send me a check for $100,000, and I’ll write you a screenplay.’ ” They sent the check. “I said, ‘Where’s the material? You want me to write a screenplay on what?’ And [Baer] said, ‘We’ll find out. We’re going to visit Bobbie.’” Raucher flew to Los Angeles to meet with Gentry to ask the question everyone else had been asking for years: So why did Billie Joe McAllister jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge? To this day, Baer still isn’t sure if the answer Gentry provided in the script was based on something that happened in Gentry’s life or not. “I assumed this was part of Bobbie’s life … She was always asked what was thrown off the bridge, and she had never told anybody. But that was one of the questions Herman asked her … I don’t know to this day [what Bobbie told Herman].” The ads teased, “What the song didn’t tell you, the movie will.” Ode to Billy Joe opened on June 3, 1976. The film’s opening date had poetic resonance, of course, as the dusty Delta day that Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. The choice was also a strategic business decision—June 3, 1976 was a Thursday, which helped pump up “opening weekend” sales figures. The story takes place in Webb, Mississippi in 1953. The opening scene features Bobbie Lee Hartley, played by actress Glynnis O’Connor, walking across the Tallahatchie Bridge. Billy Joe, incarnated by teen heartthrob Robbie Benson, is walking alongside her, trying to convince her that she’s ready for sex—with him, naturally. The song’s fuel may be mystery and existential  115 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 115

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

ennui, but the film runs on pulsing adolescent sexual desire. Reviewers wrote that though theories abounded for years, no one “in their wildest dreams” could have come up with the plot. “It’s the writer’s prerogative,” Raucher told me, “to be insane on occasion.” The pivotal scene takes place at the Okolona River Bottom Jamboree, a reference to the title of a song on The Delta Sweete. The film is studded with these kinds of references to Gentry’s songbook. Belinda is the town stripper, and Bobbie Lee’s brother’s girlfriend. Bobbie Lee’s childhood doll is named Benjamin, the title of a song on Patchwork. In the film, it’s clear that Bobbie Lee and Billy Joe are in love. The problem is her father believes she is too young to have gentleman callers. As the tension between them builds, they both look forward to the jamboree, where they could at least dance together. The party, though, gets out of control before they can dance. Billy Joe and the other town boys knock back bottle after bottle of Schlitz beer, which has been dosed with moonshine. The audience’s perspective blurs as the partygoers get drunker: Snapshots of drinking, dancing, fist fights, and steamy teenage make-outs in parked cars swirl with scenes of cops and boys sneaking into horse stalls to literally roll in the hay with local prostitutes. Billy Joe is visibly drunk when another man ushers him into the stable, where his glazed eyeballs lock on a beautiful girl. She stares back at him as she lowers her bra, silently hawking her supple wares. Cut to: Billy Joe hasn’t been seen for two days when he stumbles out of the woods and meets up with Bobbie Lee. He just can’t wait any longer—either she finally has  116 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 116

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

sex with him, or he’s going to move on. They embrace in the shadow of the forest. They’re lying in each other’s arms when Billy Joe suddenly rolls off her body. “I got drunk the other night,” he says. “Something happened.” “Can you tell me?” she asks. “No.” “Is that why you took off?” Billy Joe begins to cry. “It was something really bad, Bobbie Lee.” Billy Joe asks Bobbie Lee to meet him at the bridge at sundown. If she doesn’t, well, he can respect that. But she’s got to understand that it’s now or never. “I am onto your scent!” he cries. “I am downwind of you everywhere you go!” Bobbie Lee asks if he was with a prostitute, and he says no. “Maybe I shouldn’t know what happened,” cries Bobbie. “Maybe I should just love you. I love you Billy Joe!” Finally, he reveals his secret. “It ain’t alright! I ain’t alright!” he yells. “I have been with a man! Did you hear me? Which is a sin against nature, a sin against god! … I don’t know how I could’ve done it, I swear! I don’t know how I could be wanting you and do that.” Bobbie’s confused. Is Billy Joe gay? She says she always figured “men like that were easy to see.” “Well, you’re wrong,” says Billy. By dawn, Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. The townsfolk assume Billy Joe killed himself because Bobbie Lee is pregnant, and her brother urges her to just  117 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 117

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“get rid of the damn thing.” In 1953, most communities would have had an underground abortion provider—the level of training and skill being another matter—but it’s surprising to hear Bobbie’s brother yelling in the barn about it. He says he knows someone that does “first-rate work” from when Belinda missed her period. Since they didn’t have sex, Bobbie Lee can’t be pregnant, but she refuses to say so. Instead, Bobbie Lee decides to skip town, letting everyone believe she fled out of shame over a pregnancy that doesn’t exist. She explains herself to one person, the character who reveals himself to be the man who had sexual contact with Billy Joe. That man wants to come clean, but Bobbie Lee convinces him it’s better if they keep it a secret. “Billy Joe’s already on his way to becoming a legend,” Bobbie Lee Hartley explains. “He made a desirable girl pregnant and then jumped off the bridge. We ought to leave him with that.” “He committed suicide because of the fact that when he got with Bobbie Lee Hartley, he couldn’t perform,” says Max Baer. “And he thought that … he would never be straight, that he would be gay, and how could he be gay and be in love with her? It was that confusion.” Baer admits he was surprised when he learned that the plot would pivot on Billy Joe having sexual relations with a man. “I said, ‘That’s something else!’ … I felt that I could accept that, and I hoped that other people could, too.” While Baer respected the artistic decision regarding the gay theme, he initially worried that a studio wouldn’t pick up the movie because of it. In fact, four studios offered to make the film. After Warner Brothers released the film, the studio ran ads in trade mags triumphing its success. The ads  118 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 118

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

noted that Ode to Billy Joe earned $2,055,122 in the first four days it played in theaters across the South. Playing up success in the South was a publicity gimmick. The truth is that Ode to Billy Joe didn’t do as well with Southern audiences as in the rest of the country. “Strangely enough, the movie did not do as well in the South as we thought it would do,” recalls Baer. “It actually did better in college towns and larger cities … People talk, and they don’t want their kids to go see that kind of a movie.” Roger Ebert gave Ode to Billy Joe 2.5 stars. “Now that I know why Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge,” he wrote, “I almost wish I didn’t.” His review is actually more positive than the harsh lead suggests. But while Ebert praises the dialogue and believes the film avoided Southern stereotypes—very much at odds with other opinions—he didn’t buy the idea that Bobbie Lee would decide to leave town and let people believe she was pregnant. “Small consolation,” he wrote. As was common at the time, Raucher wrote a novel version to go with the film. In it, Bobbie Lee lights out for New Orleans, where she scrapes by as a waitress, occasionally sending home postcards full of lies, and signed with kisses. She stays long enough for everyone back home to believe she had a baby and gave it up for adoption. Then she goes back. Film critic Janet Maslin tore the movie to shreds. She wrote that Raucher’s “surprise ending” supplied “a Dark Ages rationale for Billy Joe’s high dive.” She also derided the film’s “smug condemnation of backwoods conservatism” and bemoaned the screenplay’s “myriad  119 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 119

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

contradictions.” Maslin was not having any of Gentry’s kaleidoscopic sense of fact and fiction. “The picture opens with a title explaining that it was filmed on location in Mississippi, ‘where this story actually took place.’ It closes with a disclaimer that all persons and incidents depicted are fictitious. The intervening moments seldom make any more sense than that.”

“Men Like That” While some Southerners may’ve avoided the movie, many who did go to see Ode to Billy Joe were queer kids who had never before seen homosexuality represented in a movie. Historically, the Hollywood Production Code banned films from featuring gay characters unless the film “maintained moral decency.” In other words, a gay character could appear if he or she paid the price for their sins by being murdered or committing suicide. In 1961, the Production Code was updated. “In keeping with the culture, the mores and values of our time, homosexuality and other sexual aberrations may now be treated with care.”2 The blueprint, however, was set. In Men Like That: A Southern Queer History, John Howard takes an elegant, scholarly look at Ode to Billy Joe as a “homosexual suicide narrative” that “reflected both a haunting historical reality and a grisly fictional cliché.”3 Essentially, Howard argues that the Ode to Billy Joe was significant in forming Southern queer identity because of its mainstream reach and because it both reflects and refutes realities of gay life in the South. “Queer Mississippians are most invested in the legend of Billy Joe McAllister,” wrote Howard.  120 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 120

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

In journalism, it’s well known that news reporting tends to follow a proximity principle—the closer an observer is to the community most affected by an event, the more nuanced and accurate the portrayal. The further away, whether geographically or via identities such as class, race, and gender, the more nuance collapses under ham-fisted points and stereotypes. The principle extends to entertainment, too. Though Ebert and others praised Ode to Billy Joe for avoiding Southern stereotypes, Howard argues that the film relied on a hodge-podge of homogenized “rural” elements to create an “authentic” picture of the South that Howard derides as “unschooled mish-mash.” (As an example, Howard points out that Billy Joe works at a lumber yard, though the Delta industry was cotton, not lumber, and had been deforested by the time the film was made.) Before digging deeper into Howard’s analysis, I need to interject that to me, watching the film 40 years removed, the film can be read in such a way to suggest Billy Joe was potentially sexually assaulted. After all, the man who Billy Joe has sexual relations with—it’s never clear what actually transpires, and is referred to as a “sensual porridge” in the book—is an elder authority figure in the community and Billy Joe’s boss. By modern lights, a trusted authority figure getting a teenage boy drunk, and then sexually exciting him by showing him an attractive naked woman would be called grooming, and it’s not at all clear if Billy Joe was even aware of what was happening while it was happening. Raucher says the scene was not intended to be rape. “No no, he just got drunk,” Raucher says. The older man was a gay man in the closet, and Billy Joe was just drunk and experimenting. “In my  121 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 121

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

mind, he would’ve never did it again,” Raucher said. “Had he lived.” Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge out of guilt for an act that is common, normal, and was rarely portrayed on film back in 1975. It’s just that rarity that motivated John Howard to interview gay male Mississippians about their adolescent memories of going to see Ode to Billy Joe. He found a mixed response. Though the film affirmed their existence, it also confirmed their oppression—and invisibility. Several men marveled at the way their parents seemed to hardly notice that queerness was at the film’s center, and instead saw the film the way it was marketed: as a Southern Romeo and Juliet with a gay subplot twist. For some men, Howard found, Ode was an “oppressive force,” causing them to internalize the message that they should keep their desires a secret. “It’s like, great, he’s gay,” one man told Howard. “He killed himself … what’s in store for me?”4 Despite Billy Joe’s harrowing death, though, some viewers felt relief at seeing glimmers of their identity reflected on screen at all. For the soundtrack, Gentry negotiated a deal at Warner Brothers, and then re-cut “Ode to Billie Joe” to sound just like Capitol’s version. She remarked on the weirdness of re-creating the original. “It’s funny,” Gentry said at the time. “The first time I recorded the song it took exactly four minutes and 13 seconds at the tail end of a demo session. This time we spent four hours getting it right.”5 In a way, Bobbie Gentry had been competing with her old persona for years. Now she was literally competing with herself for a hit single. When Warner Brothers released their version, Capitol responded by re-releasing  122 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 122

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

“Ode to Billie Joe” for the fourth time. “We expected it,” a spokesperson for Warner Brothers said, about Capitol capitalizing on their film. “We never had any illusions.”6 The Capitol re-issue diluted interest in the new Warner Brothers version. It peaked at #65 on the charts.

 123 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 123

27/10/2014 16:06

12

So I’m Packin’ Up and I’m Checking Out

In 1978, Gentry mounted a new show called “Southern Nights” at the Aladdin in Las Vegas. Musician Jim Stafford, known for his 1974 hit “Spiders & Snakes,” was also on the bill. The show received uncharacteristically scathing reviews. Variety, a publication that gushed over Gentry shows in the past, declared the show “not at all ready for presentation.” Perhaps some of the criticism reflected the way the strip was changing. Now, Gentry’s taste for elaborate sets, costumes, and production was described as “her anxiety for encasement” and dismissed as “the Gentry hang-up.”1 The show drew less than half the house, but the stars moved in together. Bobbie Gentry and Jim Stafford were married on October 15, 1978 in Fayette County, Tennessee. It was her third wedding. (After her brief marriage to Bill Harrah, she had another short-lived but considerably lower-key marriage to a Los Angeles police  124 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 124

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

officer.) A son, Tyler, was born the following year, and the couple broke up not long after that. In 1980, Gentry was a 38-year-old single mother. As Roger Douglas remembers it, they worked on one or two shows together after “Southern Nights.” “It was just different,” recalls Douglas. “It wasn’t the best show we did, I don’t know why. I think we did two weeks.” Douglas left the show, got into country music, and they lost touch. “She didn’t call me, and I didn’t call her, and that’s the way it was left. I never heard from her again,” he says. A photo of Gentry performing as Elvis hangs on a wall in his office. Douglas still considers Gentry a good friend. “This is a very dear person to me,” he told me. “It’s kind of like the girlfriend that got away. We all kind of loved her, she was so beautiful.” The beginning of the 1980s was essentially the end of Gentry’s public career. The strip was changing. Elvis was dead. Signing large publicity deals did not necessarily mean that the funds were easy to collect. How much more elaborate could big-budget shows get, anyway? How many more nights did she want to spend under the bright lights? How many more years on the road? Gentry sang about being tired of coming up with new ways to do the same old thing back in 1971. For a while, Gentry popped up at industry events here and there. In 1980, she appeared at the Academy of Country Music Awards to announce Willie Nelson as the Entertainer of the Year, and co-hosted the “Best of Las Vegas” awards with Sammy Davis, Jr., Joan Rivers, and Tony Orlando. Kelly Gordon fell ill, and Gentry reportedly took him in and cared for him until his death. He was only 48 years old when he died in 1981.2 That  125 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 125

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

same year, Gentry appeared on NBC’s All-Star Salute to Mother’s Day, where she sang “Mama a Rainbow” from the musical Minnie’s Boys for Ruby. In 1983, she attended the Academy of Country Music Awards, and was scheduled to co-star in a show with Mac Davis in Vegas. She canceled her appearance.3 After that, the public trail goes cold. In 1984, Bryan Holley, keeper of the Bobbiebilia, dined with Gentry, along with his father Ocie and Ruby, on Thanksgiving at her home in Los Angeles. At the time, he didn’t think of it as seeing her after she “disappeared.” To him, Gentry seemed busy. “She had her own recording studio, guitar stands with guitars, a big grand piano,” says Holley. “I got the feeling she was doing a lot of music.” Gentry gave guests a tour of the house that included a peek at her recording studio. Holley’s wife Nancy asked Gentry if she was writing songs. “Bobbie said she was working on a suite, or a series of songs,” says Nancy. “It was going to be about the homeless, and it would probably be coming out in the next year or so.” If the album was recorded, it was never released. In the early 1980s, Gentry co-wrote a screenplay for Fancy. Warner Brothers saw it as a sequel to Ode to Billy Joe, the story of what happened to Bobbie Lee Hartley after she left her small Mississippi town for the big wide world. It was never made. Plans to build a theater in Branson were abandoned. The Divine Sarah remains unproduced. In the late 1980s, Gentry reportedly left Los Angeles and moved to Savannah, Georgia. Then it seems she moved to a gated, private golf resort on Skidaway Island, off the coast of Georgia. In 1993, local newspapers reported that a woman named Bobbie Gentry hosted  126 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 126

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

a benefit for a women’s symphony there. A while ago, a man posted a message online claiming he delivered a piano to Gentry on the island, and when he recognized her, she played some songs for him. She has since moved again. Wherever she is, she is likely enjoying the renewed interest in her work beyond “Ode to Billie Joe.” In 2002, an Australian fan named John Dowler realized that he couldn’t find any Gentry records on CD, except Ode to Billie Joe and Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell. He worked with Australian boutique label Raven Records, who cut a deal with EMI Capitol to re-issue almost Gentry’s entire catalogue. There have been more articles devoted to her work in the past few years than in the 20 years before combined. Meanwhile, fans remember the sexy swivel and dark mysteries of a woman who could make air boil with nothing more than a parlor guitar and a voice low as the Mississippi moon, but preferred fancy costumes, elaborate sets, high, high heels, and bright, bright lights. In the spotlight, she dissolved into a cast of characters: Fancy, Elvis, a young girl singing an ode to Billie Joe. Bobbie Gentry. Who did she get to be out of the spotlight? Fans wonder, as Jill Sobule did in her song about Gentry, does she still sing a song or two, or does she have better things to do? Some thoughts from the people who knew her best: She truly enjoyed being an entertainer. I think she was one of those people … with show biz in their blood, like Bob Hope. She would constantly be working or doing  127 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 127

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

something and continue on for years and years, and that’s why I was surprised she just sort of dropped out. I don’t think she misses it, Tara, I don’t think she misses all that one bit. She just wasn’t the kind of star that needed that kind of attention. When she walked away, she broke everyone’s heart. That whole thing of Mississippi mud between the toes, the little girl from Mississippi, that was total PR bullshit! She had a degree from Juilliard, I think. She just got sick of it. I think she didn’t like having to be somebody that she wasn’t comfortable being, in interviews and with reporters and with people like you. This was all part of the plan.

After spending countless hours listening to Bobbie Gentry’s records, watching footage of her sing, and reading old interviews, I think her performance for the last 40 years has been her biggest and most spectacular of all. Bobbie Gentry was always able to put the audience exactly where she wanted them. Here we are, once and for all, in the dark.

 128 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 128

27/10/2014 16:06

Notes

Out of a Swamp Fog 1 Eliot Tiegel, “Bobbie Gentry’s Yule, LP Pkgs,” Billboard, April 26, 1969, 16. 2 Though the portraits of Gentry in costume that grace the cover of Fancy and Patchwork aren’t signed, it’s widely assumed she painted them herself. In Herman Raucher’s novelization of the screenplay of “Ode to Billy Joe,” the character, whose thoughts are based on Gentry’s lyrics and conversations with Raucher, observes that leaving oil paintings unsigned “only made the magic more so.” 3 Bob Thomas, “ ‘Billy Joe’ Passport to Fame,” The Washington Post, September 30, 1967.

Where is Bobbie Gentry? 1

Joe Brown, “Where Are They Now?: A Bubblegum King’s Reign,” The Washington Post, June 25, 1982. 2 John Davidson, former host of That’s Incredible!, filled in for Johnny Carson that night. I contacted him. He doesn’t remember anything special about  129 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 129

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

3 4 5 6 7

8

that evening—he doesn’t remember taping that night at all. Wayne Warga, “Bobbie Gentry Tries to Cope With Her Fame,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1969. Lydia Lane, “Bobbie Sings Ode to Rest,” Los Angeles Times, July 25, 1968. Holly George-Warren, “Mystery Girl,” MOJO, January, 2003, 63. Will Hermes, “Don’t Tell the Indie Fans: Jenny Lewis Likes Country Music,” The New York Times, January 29, 2006. When Kanye produced The Mad Rapper featuring Eminem track “Stir Crazy,” he turned to Bobbie Gentry and Glen Campbell’s “Sunday Mornin’ ” for the beat. Naturally. Morag Velikovic, “Ode to Bobbie Gentry,” After Dark, July, 1974, 32.

Chickasaw County Child 1

Gentry has said that her grandmother had Portuguese blood, but it’s not clear if she was referring to her father’s mother Maude, or her mother’s mother. 2 Judy Klemesrud, “Where’s Bobbie G. After ‘Billie Joe’?: Where’s Bobbie Gentry Now?” The New York Times, January 26, 1969. 3 The Commercial Appeal, September 29, 2013. 4 It seems Bobbie has two half-sisters and a halfbrother. Her brother Robert played with her band in Vegas, and lived with her in Los Angeles for a time. While Bobbie most often talked about her  130 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 130

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

5 6

grandparents in the press, she also mentioned her sisters, Linda and Jessye’ Lizabeth, a name fans will recognize from the song “Jessye’ Lizabeth” on The Delta Sweete. David Griffiths, “Bobbie Gentry: ‘I’ll Never Tire of Billy Joe,’” Record Mirror, June 8, 1968. Lou Walters is Barbara Walters’s father.

Becoming Bobbie Gentry 1 Eric Waggoner, “Two for the Show,” Phoenix New Times, March 8, 2001. 2 Billy Idol covered “Endless Sleep” on Charmed Life. 3 In 2008, Jody Reynolds died of liver cancer at the age of 75. By all accounts, he was a prince of a guy. 4 Ford died in 2007. 5 Interview with L-P Anderson. 6 Warren Zevon immortalized the dark and sometimes desperate rocker scene at the Hollywood Hawaiian in “Desperados Under the Eaves,” a song off 1976’s Warren Zevon. 7 “Many interview sources say that Jim was the one taking Bobbie Gentry around to publishers and labels trying to get her signed.” (L-P Anderson) 8 Aretha Franklin also recorded “Niki Hoeky” on Aretha: Lady Soul. 9 Barry White with Marc Eliot, Love Unlimited: Insights On Life & Love (New York: Broadway, 1999). 10 L-P Anderson, liner notes to The Sounds of Our Time, Jim Ford, Bear Family Records, 2007. 11 Gentry often said she wrote “Ode to Billie Joe” and  131 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 131

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

“Fancy” as short stories first, and then condensed them into verse … Other times she said the music and lyrics came to her at the same time. 12 Lolly Vegas passed away in 2010. 13 Redbone, History: 1960–70, http://www.redbone. be/history.html (August 3, 2014). 14 Interview with Pete DePoe, http://www.redbone. be/DePoe.html (June 30, 2014).

“Produced by Kelly Gordon and Bobby Paris” 1 2

Bobby Paris passed away in 2009. The Whitney was also where Phil Spector reportedly pulled a gun on Leonard Cohen while recording Death of a Ladies’ Man. 3 Robert Windeler, “Song is Southern but the Message is Universal: Bobbie Gentry Reaches Top with ‘Ballad of Billy Joe.’ ” The New York Times, August 23, 1967. 4 Windeler, “Song is Southern.” 5 Yes, her sisters are Cherie and Marie Currie of The Runaways. 6 Holly George-Warren, “Mystery Girl: The Forgotten Artistry of Bobbie Gentry,” in Eric Weisbard (ed.), Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 122. 7 “Bobby Paris Gets $32,227 in Suit Over Gentry Hit,” Billboard, August 18, 1973, 10. 8 “Bobby Paris Awarded 32G in Gentry Suit,” Variety, July 5, 1973, 4.  132 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 132

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

The Summer of “Ode to Billie Joe” 1 Co-writer Dean Kay told me that really, he wrote the song, and that Gordon just made “minimal changes.” That’s life, in the recording business. 2 Recorded well after Gordon and Gentry became an item, Defunked offers clues to how the producer and his ingénue hit it off romantically, too. Have a listen to “Love Took My Heart & Smashed That Sucker Flat.” The duet features Gentry, though she is credited only as “friend.” 3 Jeremy Roberts, “Just Go In the Studio and Make Hit Records: Jimmie Haskell Revisits Rick Nelson,” Examiner, http://www.examiner.com/article/just-gothe-studio-and-make-hit-records-jimmie-haskellrevisits-rick-nelson (January 3, 2014). 4 Either Haskell’s and Axelrod’s anecdotes conflict or we’re missing a part of the story. Maybe both. Did Kelly Gordon consider “Ode to Billie Joe” a throwaway B-side, or did it bring tears to his eyes? It’s possible that it was the addition of Haskell’s strings that made Gordon so emotional. However, it’s unlikely Capitol would spend money on professional string overdubs if they did not yet own the rights, which would mean that Gordon went from crying to disinterest. Memories fracture and fade, and sometimes we remember legend best. 5 Professional Musicians Local 47, the union, has archived session player contracts from the July, 1967 overdub sessions for the Ode to Billie Joe LP. But the contract for “Ode to Billie Joe,” the single, is  133 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 133

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

missing. “That means maybe someone came in and took it,” the archivist told me. 6 Guitarworld.com, 100 Greatest Guitar Solos: No. 45—The Doors, “Light My Fire” (Robby Krieger), http://www.guitarworld.com/100_greatest_guitar_ solos_45_quotlight_my_firequot_robby_krieger (October 30, 2008). 7 Top 60, Billboard, July 15, 1967, 16. 8 Greil Marcus, “Kill Devil Hills,” in The Old, Weird Americana: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997), p. 139. 9 Ibid. 10 It even reached Bob Dylan, who was sequestered in Woodstock, New York after crashing his motorcycle that month. He wrote a response called “Answer to Ode,” that was eventually renamed “Clothesline Saga” and released in 1975 on The Basement Tapes. Dylan chronicler Greil Marcus suggested that perhaps the secret answer song was “a perfect illusion, the private joke of Dylan’s narrator.” 11 Windeler, “Song is Southern.” 12 Leonard Feather, “The Sudden Entry of Bobbie Gentry,” Los Angeles Times, August 27, 1967. 13 Windeler, “Song is Southern.”

Capitol Pre-orders Five Times as Many Records as Meet the Beatles 1

“In all cases she had already recorded the songs with a guitar and vocal.” (Jimmie Haskell)  134 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 134

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

2 “Record Capitol Album Pressing,” Variety, August 11, 1967, 17. 3 Windeler, “Song is Southern.” 4 “Cap. Following Gentry Single Click With LP,” Billboard, August 19, 1967, 4. 5 “Bobbie Gentry’s Mercurial Rise Typifies Capitol’s Operation,” Billboard, September 16, 1967, 32. 6 The Beach Boys recorded those performances for their Lei’d in Hawaii record. 7 “Bobbie Gentry’s Mercurial Rise,” 32. 8 “ ‘Billie Joe’ Stirring Up 6-Chart Musical Storm,” Billboard, September 23, 1967, 4. 9 The exact itinerary has been lost to time. Mansfield sighed heavily as he told me that he didn’t realize any of this stuff would be interesting to people some day, so he didn’t save much of it— not even his Beatles correspondence. “I just left my office,” he said. “I just left my files.” 10 Mansfield talks about this stuff and more in his latest book, Stumbling on Open Ground: Love, God, Cancer and Rock ’n’ Roll. 11 They taped September 1. The show aired September 10, 1967. 12 David Bianculli, Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” (New York: Touchstone, 2009), 135. 13 Emily Hughes, Southeast Missourian, October 3, 1967. 14 “Down Home With Bobbie Gentry,” Life magazine, November 10, 1967, 101. 15 Wanda F. Jackson, Memories of Mississippi: Growing Up in the South (AuthorHouse, 2010), 14.  135 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 135

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

The Capitol Years 1 Gentry in Short Feature: Bobbie Gentry—Voice of the South, included as special feature on DVD release of Ode to Billy Joe. 2 Klemesrud, “Where’s Bobbie G. After ‘Billie Joe’?” 3 Ibid. 4 Gentry received production credit for two numbers on Fancy: Hal David and Burt Bacharach’s “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head” and Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues.” 5 Michael Dunaway, Paste Magazine, “Rick Hall: Always Looking for that Song,” http://www.pastemagazine. com/articles/2014/07/rick-hall-pt-1.html (July 15, 2014). 6 Velikovic, “Ode,” 32.

Viva Las Vegas 1 2 3

Variety, August 25, 1971, 47. Palm Beach Post, October 30, 1973. Forrest Duke, “Las Vegas Strip,” Variety, September 5, 1972, 7. 4 “Frontier, Las Vegas,” Variety, September 18, 1973, 41. 5 James Brown, “The Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour Heads CBS’ Summer Lineup,” Los Angeles Times, June 2, 1974. 6 Liz Smith, “People: A New Restaurant for Burt Reynolds,” The Sun, November 15, 1976. 7 Marian Christy, “BOBBIE GENTRY: The Iron Butterfly,” Boston Globe, November 17, 1970.  136 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 136

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

8 Ibid. 9 “Bobbie Gentry Signs Longterm Partnership With Jim Wasson,” Variety, April 6, 1973, 4. 10 “Bobbie Gentry, Wasson Form New Parent Co.: Planning Production,” Variety, May 17, 1973, 4. 11 Ibid. 12 These tapes weren’t part of the Bobbiebilia. 13 That was just one of several B-movie babe roles Gentry rejected. Another was The Deep-Freeze Girls, based on a book about Swiss boarding school babes described as “an overheated sexual forcing shed.” She also declined a role in Mike Nichol’s Carnal Knowledge, missing the chance to sob in bed in a bra as Jack Nicholson’s character screams that she’s a “ball-busting, castrating son-of-a-cuntbitch.” In homage, they named the character Bobbie. Ann-Margret played the part. 14 Jerry Osborne, Elvis—Word for Word: What He Said, Exactly as He Said It (New York: Harmony, 1999), 222. 15 George-Warren, 133. 16 Shirley Eder, The Blade: Toledo, Ohio, December 28, 1973. 17 “Bobbie Gentry Sues Fan Mag for $2-Mil in Defamation Suit,” Variety, February 26, 1975, 49. 18 Klemesrud, “Where’s Bobbie G. After ‘Billie Joe’?” 19 Brian Mulligan, “A Girl Gets a Bigger Whirl on BBC,” Variety, April 10, 1968, 34. 20 One of Gentry’s back-up singers was a young man named Reggie Dwight, later known as Elton John. 21 Brown, “The Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour.” 22 Ibid.  137 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 137

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

23 Cecil Smith, “Coming Back to Summer, U.S.A.,” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1974. 24 Morton Moss, Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, June 2, 1974. 25 According to Boak, Martin manufactured 5-18 guitars for regular stock from 1912 through 1989, though anyone can still order one through the custom shop. There was a flurry of production in 1957 and 1958, a time period that coincides with the beginning of Gentry’s professional career. 26 Philip Auslander, “Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto,” Contemporary Theatre Review 14 (2004): 1–13.

What the Song Didn’t Tell You, the Movie Will 1 This is not a typo. Confusingly, in the film, the suicidal teenager’s name is Billy Joe, the masculine spelling. Gentry was fixing an old mistake: she has said that the name was misspelled on the original Capitol Records single because the labels were pressed in such a rush. 2 Jody W. Pennington, The History of Sex in American Film (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2007), 132. 3 Howard, 183. 4 Howard, 185. 5 Vernon Scott, “Bobbie Gentry: From Bare Feet to Splendor,” UPI, September 13, 1976, 14. 6 Steve Toy, “On the Music Beat,” Variety, June 29, 1976, 10.

 138 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 138

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

So I’m Packin’ Up and I’m Checking Out 1 “Aladdin, Las Vegas,” Variety, April 26, 1978, 85. 2 Variety, September 2, 1981, 78. 3 Bill Willard, “Las Vegas Strip,” Variety, September 26, 1983, 14.

 139 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 139

27/10/2014 16:06

Also available in the series

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans Harvest by Sam Inglis The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller Meat is Murder by Joe Pernice The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh Abba Gold by Elisabeth Vincentelli Electric Ladyland by John Perry Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott Sign ‘O’ the Times by Michaelangelo Matos The Velvet Underground and Nico by Joe Harvard Let It Be by Steve Matteo Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk Aqualung by Allan Moore OK Computer by Dai Griffiths Let It Be by Colin Meloy Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis

18. Exile on Main Street by Bill Janovitz 19. Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. Endtroducing … by Eliot Wilder 25. Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. In the Aeroplane Over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Paul’s Boutique by Dan LeRoy 31. Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. In Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti

 140 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 140

27/10/2014 16:06

TA R A MURTH A

36. Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Use Your Illusion Vols 1 and 2 by Eric Weisbard 42. Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Let’s Talk About Love by Carl Wilson 53. Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Master of Reality by John Darnielle 57. Reign in Blood by D. X. Ferris

58. Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. XO by Matthew LeMay 64. Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. One Step Beyond … by Terry Edwards 67. Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. 69 Love Songs by L. D. Beghtol 70. Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles 73. Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Kid A by Marvin Lin 76. Spiderland by Scott Tennent 77. Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. You’re Living All Over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman

 141 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 141

27/10/2014 16:06

ODE TO BILLIE JOE

84. Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Dummy by R. J. Wheaton 86. Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall 90. Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Entertainment! by Kevin J. H. Dettmar

92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

Blank Generation by Pete Astor Donuts by Jordan Ferguson Smile by Luis Sanchez Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. ( ) by Ethan Hayden 100. Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Tago Mago by Alan Warner

 142 •

•

9781623569648_txt_print.indd 142

27/10/2014 16:06