Having one of those voices that is perfectly suited to country music, pretty Roberta Lee Streeter of Chickasaw County, Mississippi, found sudden celebrity in 1967 under her stage name, Bobbie Gentry. The new last name, Gentry, was taken from the 1952 film Ruby Gentry, featuring Charleton Heston and Jennifer Jones, and the song that made her immediately famous was Ode to Billy Joe. Gentry, who had done some acting and dancing prior to her big hit, wrote this song, which in its original form was far too long for radio play. Having to shorten it, she succeeded in making what really happened in the song mysterious, and the object of much public speculation.
The song centered around something that happened at theTallahatchie Bridge on a sleepy, dusty Delta day. The way she constructed the song's lyrics was clever and original, alternating a dinnertime conversation at a young girl's family farm with mysterious events up on Choctaw Ridge and on the bridge, from which something reportedly had been thrown into the water. In the end, Billy Joe McAllister committed suicide by jumping from the same bridge, and the girl who is relating the action in the lyrics took to passing her days picking wildflowers on the ridge and dropping them into the river from the bridge.
Bobbie Gentry never repeated her initial success, worrked for a while for Armed Forces Radio, and then moved to California, apparently out of the music business.
No comments:
Post a Comment