Bobbie Gentry – Ode to Billie Joe (1967): Et in Arcadia Ego ~ June Light, June Wind

Arcadia was an idyllic paradise, a rural sanctuary, that was longed for even in the days of ancient Greece and Rome as urban life dominated and pastoral life disappeared. Arcadia was a mystical, mythical realm for medieval Europeans. During the Baroque era, the Italian artist Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (known as Guercino) created a painting named Et in Arcadia Ego (1619) where two shepherds within the woods gaze at a skull with those words inscribed beneath this “memento mori”, this reminder of human mortality. Arcadia for citizens during the age of the Industrial Revolution was a refuge of solitude “far from the madding crowd” of cities, as graveyard poet Thomas Gray lamented. On June 3, 1750, Thomas Gray visited the cemetery of Saint Giles the Hermit in Stoke Poges. He was inspired to compose “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, considered the most quoted poem about death in the English language.

In 1848, the poet James Russell Lowell wrote about June’s arcadian power:

“What is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune…
We hear life murmur…
Now is the high-tide of the year…”

The 1926 American book Nature’s Program echoes James Russell Lowell’s exaltation of June in its description of the evening primrose: “Seen by the dusty roadside, on some hot June afternoon, it presents a jaded, bedraggled appearance… come back to this same flower after sunset, in the twilight. We shall see a striking change. At sunset, one of the buds at the top began to expand its delicate petals and is now open. Its yellowish-white disk, surmounting a deep, vase-like calyx, is visible in the growing dark, like a miniature moon–and the fragrance, unnoticed in the hot sunshine, is now strongly evident.”

Thomas De Quincey, the British Romantic essayist who influenced Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, the French Symbolists and Surrealists, and the American counterculture of the late 1960s / early 1970s in their exploration of psychedelic drugs due to his autobiography of addiction Confessions of an English Opium Eater, also experienced a deepening awareness of death during the month at which mother nature’s life-force is supposed to reach its zenith. On June 2, 1792, when De Quincey was seven years old, his older sister Elizabeth died at the age of only nine years old. This moment cast a long shadow over De Quincey. He reflected on this fateful day in his Suspiria de Profundis:

“Nothing met my eyes but one large window wide open, through which the sun of midsummer at noonday was showering down torrents of splendor… death… is more profoundly affecting in summer than other parts of the year… the summer we see, the grave we haunt with our thoughts; the glory is around us, the darkness is within us… from the gorgeous sunlight, I turned round to the corpse… whilst I stood, a solemn wind began to blow,–the most mournful that ear ever heard. Mournful! That is saying nothing. It was a wind that had swept the fields of mortality for a hundred centuries. Many times since, upon a summer day, when the sun is about the hottest, I have remarked the same wind arising and uttering the same hollow, solemn, Memnonian, but saintly swell; it is in this world the one sole audible symbol of eternity.”

I lived for nine years in a small Southern town in the United States. On June 2, 2001, my childhood best friend drowned in the muddy, murky river which coursed through those hot, humid, mosquito-ridden summers like a coiled, fanged snake. He was only fifteen years old when he died. I had known him since I was seven years old. I was a pallbearer at his funeral. While the preacher ranted about brimstone, the cross, the crucifixion, the damned, fire, heaven, hell, and the saved, I felt as if I could not breathe. I had to escape. I exited the church and closed the doors behind me. All alone at last, in the breezeway, I gazed at the face of my friend in the coffin. My sweating brow. His marble eyes. Outside, the breeze rustled the leaves in the tops of the trees. Slowly, one by one, the zephyr rose in volume, then died away again.

Bobbie Gentry recorded her debut album at Capitol Studio C in Hollywood, California. Ode to Billie Joe is certainly a flawed record. The same acoustic guitar riff is used on multiple tracks, several of the lyrics are fairly fluffy (“Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You”, “Bugs”, “Lazy Willie”) rather than resonant, and some of the songs are too tired (“I Saw an Angel Die”, “Sunday Best”, “Hurry, Tuesday Child”). Jimmie Haskell’s cinematic string sections (creeping on “Bugs”; gossamer as a spiderweb on “I Saw an Angel Die”; ghostly on “Ode to Billie Joe”; nostalgic on “Sunday Best”, “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You”, “Hurry, Tuesday Child”; swooping on “Chickasaw County Child”) and Kelly Brown’s production arrangements (blaring brass and humming harmonica on the swamp rock of “Mississippi Delta” and the country reveries of “Chickasaw County Child”; jazzy horns, mellow vibes, and wistful harmonica on “I Saw an Angel Die”, “Sunday Best”, “Papa, Woncha Let Me Go to Town With You”, and “Hurry, Tuesday Child”) could be considered either atmospheric and moody or an overblown weakness, depending on what state of mind you are in and where you are when you hear the album.

Where is most important with Ode to Billie Joe. It can sound rather dated and sleepy if you are spinning the record in the comfort of an air-conditioned apartment in the city. Ode to Billie Joe is rural. Ode to Billie Joe is Southern. It is best heard a.) in the crackle and hiss of old vinyl while sitting on a front porch drinking a beer or whiskey, preferably located near forests and woods, in the evening as the summer sun sets or b.) in your car driving down backroads through small Southern towns in the summertime with the windows rolled down.

Ode to Billie Joe feels like a few of my own memories–the boredom of long summer daze that seemed to drag on forever when I was a kid in that small Southern town while blood sucking stings and buzzing drones of insects emerged from the dirty creeks, flooded fields, gnarled trees, and sludgy sloughs.

Ode to Billie Joe is not special simply because Bobbie Gentry had a gritty, sultry voice. Ode to Billie Joe is not special simply because it showed a completely different side of life and music in the summer of 1967 (and knocked The Beatles’ grossly overrated Sgt. Pepper’s off the Billboard charts.) Ode to Billie Joe is something special because of Bobbie Gentry’s evocative, imagistic lyrics on her strongest tracks. These songs vividly move the listener through the memories and places of her childhood and adolescence: her home state (“Mississippi Delta”), her hometown (“Chickasaw County Child”), and a mystery (“Ode to Billie Joe”).

In “Mississippi Delta”, the delight is in the details:

“Wearin’ last year’s possum belt
Have me a little that Johnny cake
A little bit of that apple pan dowdy
Pickin’ them scuppernon’s off that vine
Chigger bite, it’s goin’ to beat howdy
Ate me a bucket of Muscadine
Sit on the riverbank after dark
Drop my line down a crawdad hole
Do him in with a scaly bark.”

In “Chickasaw County Child”, Roberta Lee Streeter shares a portrait of her family and how she left her hometown behind for California:

“Born seven miles outside of Woodland
Bought her a store-bought doll from Jackson
Sporting her checkered feed sack dress
A ruby ring from a Cracker Jack box
Shufflin’ on down that gravel road
Barefooted and chunking rocks
Momma said looky here dumplin’
You’ll go far, cause you got style
Leavin’ the county a week from Monday
Ain’t got much to pack
A tin can of black strap sogga molasses
And her momma’s almanac
Momma done made her a brand new dress
Made of blue polka dotted silk”

The real reason Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe continues to speak so deeply to me and continues to mesmerize and mystify through the decades is the Southern Gothic title track. Begins with the date (“Third of June”), the location and weather (“another sleepy, dusty Delta day”), a tragedy (“seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge and now Billie Joe McAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge”), and a secret (“He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge and she and Billie Joe was throwin’ somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”)

The final stanza of the song is unforgettable:

“There was a virus going ’round; papa caught it, and he died last springAnd 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 Tallahatchie Bridge.”

Bobbie Gentry never reveals what plummeted into the river before Billie Joe committed suicide. Was it an aborted fetus, a murdered person? What’s most memorable about this song is not only that you never discover the truth – it’s about how closed-minded, impoverished small towns can empty individuals of their empathy and make people feel trapped, how the death of a friend or loved one can haunt you for the rest of your life, and how the passage of time can make everyone and everything eventually forgotten.

by Mark Lager