Bobbie Gentry is a pioneering spirit. A girl accountable for her music, her picture, her enterprise, she launched seven albums in simply 5 years. She was comfy in nation, pop, soul, and people. One of many nice American storytellers, her terrain was the advanced relationship of sophistication, gender, household, sexuality – all certain up in Southern delusion.
Born Roberta Lee Streeter, on July 27, 1944, she gave herself the identify Gentry, impressed by the title character within the 1952 movie Ruby Gentry. On this melodrama, Ruby Gentry was a poor Southern woman and “a tramp who looks like a lady but doesn’t behave like one” – a transparent early affect on Bobbie’s nascent songwriting. Bobbie, too, grew up in remoted rural poverty; she had neither electrical energy nor toys. Although she denied that her songs had been autobiographical, she was plainly intimate with each location she sang about, and the troublesome ethical selections that include by no means having sufficient to dwell on.
Bobbie beloved each philosophy and showbiz; the previous she studied at UCLA, and the latter she broke into by means of stints as a mannequin and performer in Los Angeles nightclubs. But, all of the whereas, Bobbie was creating her personal imaginative and prescient, one thing that mixed the on a regular basis and the extraordinary.
Chief of the pack
A feminine singer-songwriter (which was uncommon sufficient in itself), she was distinctive in her narrative palate. From its title alone, “Ode To Billie Joe” – which she included on the very first demo she introduced to Capitol Data, in 1967 – sounds prefer it’ll be a he’s-so-fine celebration of younger love. As a substitute, Bobbie Gentry drew the listener in to an existential expertise of grief. Not like the “death discs” fad (tracks comparable to The Shangri-Las’ “Leader Of The Pack”), “Ode To Billie Joe” left out the gory drama of Billie Joe McAllister’s suicide. As a substitute, Bobbie targeted on the silence that the neighborhood used to deal with this surprising occasion. Billie Joe’s loss of life mercilessly uncovered the isolation that exists between individuals, even inside households.
The music was additionally a cracking thriller story. What in hell had been the 2 younger lovers lobbing off the Tallahassee Bridge? Pestered to disclose it in interviews, Bobbie steadfastly refused. “It’s not really important what they are throwing off the bridge,” she mentioned. “The important thing is that people don’t really care about what happens to another person.”
Launched in 1967, the affect of “Billie Joe” was seismic. The music itself was broadly and nearly instantly coated: The Supremes, Nancy Wilson, Tammy Wynette, and Lou Donaldson all recorded variations inside a 12 months. Jeannie C Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA,” from 1968, mined related themes of gossip and small-town hypocrisy, and appears a direct descendent of Bobbie’s Southern-baked storytelling. The emotive songwriting of Dolly Parton was a cousin to Bobbie’s tales of goals and destitution, as was the cheerful psychodrama of Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps And Thieves.” The boundaries of what a profitable feminine singer-songwriter might deal with had been immediately far wider due to Bobbie’s vary and ability.
Bobbie Gentry herself returned to the narratives of her childhood in 1970’s “Fancy,” through which an impoverished mom grooms her daughter to be a prostitute. “‘Fancy’ is my strongest statement for women’s lib, if you really listen to it,” she has mentioned. “I agree wholeheartedly with that movement and all the serious issues that [it stands] for – equality, equal pay, day-care centers, and abortion rights.” The music additionally incorporates one among Bobbie’s best ever lyrics, because the scared teenager, now made-up and in a dancing gown, watches “a roach crawl across the toe of my high-healed shoe”: a picture worthy of one other nice Southern chronicler, William Faulkner.
“It’s totally my own from inception to performance”
You possibly can argue Bobbie Gentry’s music was nation; you could possibly argue she was a folkie. She might howl out swirling psychedelic swamp-rock comparable to “Mississippi Delta” or burble alongside gently on the easy-does-it ‘I’ll By no means Fall In Love Once more’ (her solely UK No.1). There was soul; there was conceptual fancy; there was avant-garde pop. She even recorded an (unreleased) album of jazz requirements. Artists the likes of Dusty Springfield or Joni Mitchell may need straddled two or three of those, however few would sound so comfy in so many. There appeared a bravery about Bobbie Gentry, a have-a-go spirit particularly uncommon given the straightjacket for feminine artists on the time.
Bobbie additionally challenged the conventions about studio management. “I produce my own records,” she has mentioned. “I originally produced ‘Ode To Billie Joe,’ and most of the others, but a woman doesn’t stand much chance in a recording studio. A staff producer’s name was nearly always put on the record.” Musically, the preparations would replicate her tales; the lurching strings of “Ode To Billie Joe,” as an example, mirror the nauseous unhappiness of the narrator. Alternatives for feminine producers have been depressingly gradual to advance (a lady has by no means received a Grammy for manufacturing, and solely a handful of ladies have ever been nominated in that class), however not less than Bobbie fought to have her contribution acknowledged. By Patchwork, her last album, in 1971, she was totally credited as producer.
Although she largely ceased recording after Patchwork, Bobbie Gentry wasn’t carried out fairly but. within the presentation of her music (and a voracious fashionista too), Bobbie now went all-out with a sequence of Las Vegas performances, which drew from her grit’n’glamour early nightclub stints a decade earlier. “I write and arrange all the music, design the costumes, do the choreography, the whole thing – I’m completely responsible for it,” she mentioned of her 70s reveals. “It’s totally my own from inception to performance.”
Her affect nonetheless programs by means of
Customary within the music trade now, Bobbie’s present, that includes a number of costume adjustments, character-based music interpretations, and tightly-choreographed dancers, was one of many first of its kind. She was camp and theatrical, concurrently celebrating and mocking artificiality (her Elvis impression impressed The King himself, who snuck right into a efficiency one night time). She earned megabucks from these reveals and, answerable for her personal enterprise dealings from the very begin, stored the whole thing.
Lastly, when she didn’t need to do all of it anymore, she simply stopped. Her final public look was in 1981, and all requests for interviews, appearances, and comebacks have been flatly refused since.
In addition to her achievements in writing, manufacturing, and efficiency, this Renaissance lady additionally achieved one thing extra nebulous, however maybe most important of all. Bobbie Gentry was a persona. She was in the end unknowable; listening carefully to her music solely yields extra questions, fewer solutions. She performed with the conventions of each femininity and Americana, and her affect nonetheless programs by means of the shifting plains of the Mississippi Delta.
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