Ode to Billie Joe
Artist: Gentry Bobbie
Album: Chickasaw County Child
Released as a single in late July, 1967. it became a massive number-one hit
It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door "y'all remember to wipe your feet"
And then she said "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge"
"Today Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"
And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
"Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please"
"There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"
And Mama said it was shame about Billy Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billy Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?
"I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don't seem right"
"I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge"
"And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"
And Mama said to me "Child, what's happened to your appetite?"
"I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite"
"That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today"
"Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way"
"He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge"
"And she and Billy Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"
A year has come 'n' gone since we heard the news 'bout Billy Joe
And Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus going 'round, Papa caught it and he died last Spring
And now Mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge
The story
This song is a first person narrative that reveals a quasi-Southern Gothic tale in its verses by including the dialog of the narrator's immediate family at lunchtime on the day that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge."
The song begins with the narrator and her brother returning, after morning chores, to the family house for dinner. After cautioning them about tracking in dirt, "Mama" says that she "got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge" that "Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge," apparently to his death.
At the dinner table, the narrator's father is unsurprised at the news and says, "Well, Billie Joe never had a lick o' sense," and mentions that there are "five more acres in the lower forty I got to plow." Although her brother seems to be taken aback ("I saw him at the sawmill yesterday.... And now you tell me Billie Joe has jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"), he's not shocked enough to keep him from having a second piece of pie. Late in the song, Mama questions the narrator's complete loss of appetite ("Child, what's happened to your appetite? I been cookin' all mornin' and you haven't touched a single bite,") yet earlier in the song recalled a visit earlier that morning by Brother Taylor who is, apparently, the local preacher. He mentioned that he had seen Billie Joe and a girl who looked (to him) very much like the narrator herself and they were "throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge."
In the song's final verse, a year has passed, during which the narrator's brother has married and moved away. Also, her father died from a viral infection, which has left her mother despondent. The narrator herself now visits Choctaw Ridge often, picking flowers there to drop from the Tallahatchie Bridge onto the murky waters flowing beneath it.
Mystery craze
The mysteries surrounding the characters in the song created something of a cultural sensation. In 1975, Gentry told author Herman Raucher that she hadn't come up with a reason for Billie Joe's suicide when she wrote the song. She has stated in numerous interviews over the years that the focus of the song was not the suicide itself, but the rather matter-of-fact way that the narrator's family was discussing the tragedy over dinner, unaware that Billie Joe might well have been her boyfriend.
A popular speculation at the release of the song in 1967 (unsupported by either the song's lyrics or the culture of that area and time period) was that the narrator and Billie Joe threw their baby (either stillborn or aborted) off the bridge, and Billie Joe then killed himself out of grief and guilt. This version of events is accentuated in the Sinead O'Connor version, where a baby is heard to cry at the moment the mystery item is thrown off the bridge. There was also speculation that Billie Joe was a black man, having a forbidden affair with the white narrator, although the culture of that area, in that time period, made it extremely unlikely that a black male would have had any part in the events described in the song's lyrics (a frog down the narrator's back at a public movie theater, socializing with the narrator's family after church, or being seen together throwing "something" off of a bridge in public).
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Given that "Clothes Line Saga" was originally titled "Answer to an Ode" when Garth Hudson was labeling reel-to-reel tapes and storing them in boxes, one can picture Dylan and the Band, holed up in the Basement of Big Pink in the late summer of 1967, surveying the field of popular music from which they are seeking temporary refuge, wondering just where they fit in the whole scene exactly. They had toured the USA and Europe making incredible music but were often booed when Dylan brought the Band out for the second half of the show. They had to wonder why their music was being so reviled and rejected while a song like "Ode to Billie Joe" was riding high atop the charts.
So, Dylan borrows the idea of imbedding a narrative in the context of snatches of everyday, meaningless conversation and comes up with his own answer to an ode. But unlike Bobbie Gentry's tragic event--a mysterious suicide with roots in love, romance and domesticity--Dylan's story reaches out from the realm of the personal, the realm of the protagonist's everyday, ordinary life, to the public and the political. Dylan's narrator is performing an ordinary household chore, hanging up and taking in the laundry, doing what he is told, while outside, in the larger world, apparently
the Vice President's gone mad.
Where? Downtaown?
When? Last night,
Hmm...Say, that's too bad!
It could be argued that a Dylan ode or saga has a different kind of truth telling going on than the one by Bobbie Gentry. A year later, Bobbie Gentry's narrator is quietly, secretly mourning Billie Joe's death. Dylan's narrator's fate is more immediate and ominous. After being told by Papa that Mama wants him to "bring them clothes" back in the house with him, he drawls:
So I did it, of course
I went back in the house and Mama met me
And then I shut all the doors.
Apparently things are sufficiently dark and menacing out there in the world that it is time to hunker down, close all the doors, and leave the world of politics to descend into madness all by itself. I find this much more dark and disturbing than Billie Joe's suicide though the latter is also moving and disturbing in its own way. But which set of events has the wider, deeper impact?
While some say that the Dylan lyrics are utterly devoid of meaning, I think there is a kind of movement, a progression that we can see in the lyrics. In the first stanza, Mama picks up a book--a primary source of knowledge, ideas and power in this world--and Papa ask her what is was. Someone else chimes in with "What do you care" and Papa claims, "Just because." A simple, befuddling verbal excahnge but not without depth and meaning. One question the verbal exchange raises is about where is "knowledge: found and who gets to gain access to it? It not only suggests the limitations of language to get at deeper meanings, as well, but points up the emptiness, the void, lurking in so much of our everyday, cliche-ridden exchanges with each other. "You got it! There ya go. Seriously? It's not over 'till it's over," etc., etc.. The second stanza has the Vice President going mad and the final stanza includes the retreat into the shut up house with all the doors and windows locked. I do not think these lyrics, contextualized by banalities as they are, are devoid of meaning.
Complete lyrics to "Clothesline Saga":
After a while we took in the clothes
Nobody said very much
Just some old wild shirts and a couple pairs of pants
Which nobody really wanted to touch
Mama come in and picked up a book
An' Papa asked her what it was
Someone else asked, What do you care?
Papa said,Well, just because
Then they started to take back their clothes
Hang'em on the line
It was January the thirtieth
And everybody was feelin' fine.
The next day, everybody got up
Seein' if the clothes were dry
The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed
Mama, of cource, she said, Hi"
"Have you heard the news?" he said with a grin
"The Vice President's gone mad"
"Where?" "Downtown." "When?" "Last night"
"Hmm, say, that's too bad"
"Well, there's nothing we can do about it," said the neighbor
"It's just something we're gonna have to forget"
"Yes, I guess so" said Ma
Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet.
I reached up, touched my shirt
And the neighbor said, "Are those clothes yours?"
I said, "Some of them, not all of them"
He said, "Ya always help out around here with the chores ?"
I said, "Sometime, not all the time"
Then my neighbor he blew his nose
Just as papa yelled outside
"Mama wants you to come back in the house and bring them clothes"
Well, I just do what I'm told so I did it, of course
I went back in the house and Mama met me
And then I shut all the doors.
In support of the notion that Dylan's lyrics were a response to Bobbie Gentry's, there is also a perception about "Tears of Rage" that it offered a different insight into generational conflict than had the Door's "The End" from their first album. In this song, Jim Morrison depicts a killer who awakens before dawn:
The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he
Paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside
Father, yes son, I want to kill you
Mother...i want to...[the final words morph into a primal scream but implied, in the Odedipal sense is, "I want to fuck you" and this is what almost all the online version of the lyrics say today]
One story that circulated at the time was that listening to this tune, members of the Band and Dylan felt that they really could not relate to this lyric and the Band decided to embrace their "next of kin" (a line found in "This Wheel's on Fire") on their debut album by including a group photo of all the Band's family members. "Tears of Rage" seems to tell the story of parent child relations from the parent's point of view. Although some see the lyrics as reflecting the divide in the country over the Vietnam war and address a nation divided (coniser the reference to Independence Day), with lines like:
Tears Of Rage
We carried you in our arms
On Independence Day,
And now you'd throw us all aside
And put us on our way.
Oh what dear daughter 'neath the sun
Would treat a father so,
To wait upon him hand and foot
And always tell him, "No"?
These lines certainly suggest a father-daughter dialogue. The parents do their best to do what parents do: teach and point the way for thier childern, something addressed in verse two:
We pointed out the way to go
And scratched your name in sand,
Though you just thought it was nothing more
Than a place for you to stand.
Now, I want you to know
That while we watched you discover
That no one could be true true.
I myself was amongst the ones who thought
It was a childish thing to do.
Sometimes the hardest thing for a parent is to sit by and watch their child learn the most painful lessons that life has to teach--that maybe no one can be really "true." They tried to send their child a message; they scratched her name in sand so that she might see the path that she was to to follow. But she took it differently. She thought is was somehow where she was supposed to stand, or perhaps to end up, but not a starting point. Finally, in the last verse:
It was all very painless
When you went out to receive
All that false instruction
Which we never could believe.
And now the heart is filled with gold
As if it was a purse.
But, oh, what kind of love is this
Which goes from bad to worse?
Children have to learn their own lessons, follow their own path, and the knowledge they embrace may not be the knowledge that their parents would select for them...but such is parenthood. Since our "sons and our daughters are beyond your command," they have to go out and learn things on their own even though they may abosrb "false instruction which we never could believe." Here the parents seem to be watching their child's heart transform from its pure, innocent childlike state into something corrupted by materialism, a heart filled with gold.
The chorus which follows each verse is sung with such passion and pathos that it is truly heart-rending:
Tears of rage, tears of grief,
Why must I always be the thief?
[Or, as Dylan himself sings it, "Why am I always the one who must...BE THE THIEF?]
Come to me now, you know
We're so alone...
And life is brief.
Something I have always wondered about...Bob Dylan was a new father in the days he composed these lyrics. He had two young children and another adopted. Fatherhood IS transformative, but did he already see, could he have intuited at age 26 while still such a new, young father, the depth of pain and hearbreak, the extent of vulnerabiity that parenthood entails? There you are, a young man, on top of the world, a famous entertainer, starting to raise your own family, and BAM, you see it: life is brief and may be full of disappointment and heartbreak, replete with experiences that give rise to both anger and grief. Yep, there it is: one of life's deeper truths. Bob had always warned us, "Don't ask me nothin' about nothin', I just might tell ya the truth!" ("Outlaw Blues," from BIABH).