You might wrestle to imagine it, however at the peak of the Summer season Of Love, the haunting title monitor to Bobbie Gentry’s debut album, Ode To Billie Joe, knocked The Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ off the highest of Billboard’s Scorching 100. A darkish and tense track, half nation ballad, half Southern gothic homicide thriller, ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ definitely wasn’t a hippified quantity, however credit score the general public for recognizing the sweetness, brains, and brilliance of the artist in query. Or as one reviewer put it: “If she didn’t have a Miss America type figure (37-23-37) you might call her an intellectual.” Aw, shucks.
This story of star-crossed lovers concerned in peculiar shenanigans in Mississippi’s Choctaw Ridge despatched tongues wagging within the narrative. A small-town intrigue that features as a musical model of a traditional American brief story, ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ is a lower that retains razor-sharp however can by no means be correctly resolved, since Gentry refuses to let on as to what was thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge by Billie Joe McAllister. She picked up her two Grammy Awards with an insouciant smile.
When Ode To Billie Joe got here out a month later (August 1967) it additionally topped the Pop and Nation charts, and made No.5 on the Black Albums charts, testimony to Gentry’s soulful supply. In some ways, she pioneered the feminine model of Muscle Shoals-style beats, and he or she offered an actual badass guitar, whether or not taking part in electrical or acoustic. Such was the demand for the album that Capitol pressed an unprecedented 500,000 copies (the earlier report was 100,000 for Meet The Beatles!).
Gritty authenticity
The massive hit was left till final on the album, which was produced by Kelly Gordon and orchestrated by Jimmy Haskell (who additionally grabbed a Grammy for his association on the only), however Ode To Billie Joe was way over 9 filler songs and the smash. The opening ‘Mississippi Delta’ is one other peach, with an environment and narrative construction harking back to Jimmy Webb and Tom T Corridor. The nation blues ‘I Saw An Angel Die’ is a doozy, whereas the autobiographical ‘Chickasaw County Child’ and the down-home ‘Sunday Best’ have parts of rural white gospel. There may be additionally an air of gritty authenticity in ‘Bugs’, a childhood recollection of residing on a farm with dirt-poor hillbilly of us.
The one track not written by Gentry is Jim Ford’s ‘Niki Hoeky’, a positive slice of hokum with a deep groove that showcases her versatility. The jazzier association of ‘Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You’ sends Aspect Two of the album off on a left flip, after which there’s the charming chastisement of ‘Lazy Willy’ to lift a smile earlier than we get again around the kitchen desk for ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ – in its unique model a for much longer track with additional verses that Gentry dialed down for business influence.
A long-lasting legacy
Although she achieved additional fame working with Glen Campbell, and have become the primary girl to host her personal TV selection collection – for the BBC, within the years 1968 to 1971 – Gentry didn’t duplicate her preliminary success as a solo artist, however she was savvy sufficient to land a million-dollar contract to star in a nightclub revue in Las Vegas. There have been additionally high-profile appearances on TV reveals hosted by Campbell, Tom Jones, Andy Williams, Carol Burnett, and Bobby Darin.
The massive hit that began all of it gained her a spot within the Grammy Corridor Of Fame in 1999, and, lest we neglect, Ode To Billie Joe additionally displaced Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Coronary heart Membership Band from the highest spot in October 1967, making Gentry a triple thorn in The Beatles’ facet.
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