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An Ode to Bobbie Gentry at 70 -

REBEAT Magazine
About Sharon Lacey 40 Articles
12-15 minuta

In May 1981, Bobbie Gentry was one of many guest

stars on the NBC special “An All-Star Salute To Mother’s
Day.” She sang just one song: a touching rendition of the
Broadway tune “Mama, A Rainbow,” dedicated to her own
mother in the audience.

What no one knew at the time was that this would be her
last onstage appearance ever.

On Sunday, Bobbie Gentry will turn 70 years old. She

hasn’t given an interview or public performance in over 30
years and the last time she was photographed was at the
Country Music Awards in early 1982. Yet, Gentry with all
her Southern charm, sultry looks and evocative hits such as
“Ode To Billie Joe” and “Fancy” remains a hugely influential,
iconic and enigmatic artist.

It’s true that Gentry may be more of a cult figure these days
but back in the late ’60s and early ’70s it was hard to
escape this beautiful, big-haired, husky-voiced girl from
Mississippi, with her hit singles, TV specials, and even a
successful Las Vegas revue. Her brief but startling career in
music began in July 1967 when the then-unknown Gentry
managed the incredible feat of knocking the Beatles’ “All
You Need Is Love” off the top of the Billboard chart with her
debut single. The song that managed this feat was a
seemingly simple country/folk tune featuring just Gentry on
her five-string acoustic guitar, some atmospheric strings,
her distinctive smoky vocals and some intriguing lyrics.
“Today Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie
Bridge,” she sang in her conversational tale of a local
boy’s suicide and a family’s indifference to the news. Just
why did Billie Joe jump off that bridge? And what exactly did
he and the girl, who looks just like the narrator of the song,
throw off the bridge the day before? Whatever it was,
Gentry wasn’t saying and the song went on to rule the
airwaves that summer, staying at number one for four
weeks, selling more than three million copies and later
earning her two GRAMMY Awards. Bob Dylan even
recorded an affectionate parody of the song with the Band,
first called “Answer To Ode” and later renamed “Clothes
Line Saga” when it turned up on The Basement Tapes in
1975.
Bobbie Gentry was so much more than “Ode To Billie Joe”
though. To reduce her contributions to just one song is a
huge underestimation of her talent and her role as a
trailblazer, as one of the first female musicians who wrote,
produced and even published her own music. Although she
never again achieved the success of her first single, her
albums are something of a joy to discover. She only
released six solo albums in all, plus a duets record with
Glen Campbell, but during her career, Bobbie Gentry never
did things half-hearted. She took full control of her own
music, starred in TV variety shows in the UK and the States
and even when she took up a residency in Vegas, was
involved in every aspect from the arrangements to the
costumes to the choreography. Then, when she decided
she had had enough, Bobbie Gentry was fully committed to
that, too, and left show business — never to be heard from
again. In fact, when “Ode To Billie Joe” was inducted into
the GRAMMY Hall Of Fame in 1999, it’s said that they
couldn’t even find a contact or address to send the award
to.

Although “Ode To Billie Joe” was turned into a feature film

in 1976, Gentry’s own life is easily worthy of a movie. Born
Roberta Lee Streeter in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, she
spent her childhood years on her grandparents’ farm, after
her own parents divorced, where she grew up without
electricity or plumbing. She discovered her love of music
listening to jazz and blues on an old battery-powered radio.
“My grandmother noticed how much I liked music, so she
traded one of her milk cows for a neighbour’s piano,” she
said, sounding like a line from one of her own songs.
Gentry learned to play watching the pianist at her local
church, and it was on this old piano that she wrote her first
songs, aged just seven. She later reunited with her mother
when she moved to Palm Springs, California, to attend
school and it was here, at 14, that she saw the movie Ruby
Gentry, from which she took her stage name. It also was
during this time that she taught herself to play guitar, bass,
banjo and vibes. Gentry, it seems, was destined for a life in
music.

With her new stage name, Gentry began performing in

clubs, supporting herself as a UCLA philosophy
student, before going on to study guitar and composition at
the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. In 1967, her demo
found its way into the hands of Capitol Records producer
Kelly Gordon, who quickly signed her to a deal. He chose to
record the rocking “Mississippi Delta” from the demo as her
first single, while “Ode To Billie Joe” was almost an
afterthought, recorded in just 40 minutes for the
B-side. After its release, radio stations preferred the flip side
of the single and the rest, as they say, is history.

The album Ode To Billie Joe was hastily recorded to cash-

in on the single’s success, but it certainly doesn’t sound it.
Expanding on the bluesy, country sounds of her most
famous single, it is easily the grittiest and least polished of
all her records and actually benefits from this. Gentry wrote
all but one of the tracks on the album, which range from the
jazzy “Papa, Won’t You Let Me Go To Town With You?” to
the sad beauty of “I Saw An Angel Die.” It’s an album no
Bobbie Gentry fan should be without.

The Delta Sweete quickly followed in early 1968 and was

even more ambitious. A concept album detailing Gentry’s
Mississippi childhood, many believe it to be her
masterpiece. Although not a million miles from “Ode To
Billie Joe” in style, it veers from bluesy ballads to bright
country soul to mournful folk numbers, each song flowing
into one other. Highlights include the sensuous “Mornin’
Glory,” the brassy groove of “Okolona River Bottom Band”
and the dreamy “Courtyard.”

Even though The Delta Sweete produced no big hits,

Capitol was keen for Gentry to keep recording in order to
capitalize on “Ode To Billie Joe”’s success. What followed
was Local Gentry, featuring Bobbie looking stunning in a
tight, red suit on the cover. Unsurprisingly, due to its
closeness to The Delta Sweete, there were less original
songs on the album, with Gentry only writing four of the 11
tracks, but they show her at the height of her powers.

It’s hard to imagine anyone else writing a song about a

funeral parlour director with such humour and insight as she
does on “Casket Vignette” (“I understand he was your
fiancé, what a tragedy”) and “Sweet Peony” has a cool
Southern swagger. The same year also saw the release of
probably Bobbie Gentry’s least essential album, although it
was a big hit at the time: her duets record with Glen
Campbell. The pairing proved hugely popular with the public
and earned them several big hits including their cover of the
Everly Brothers favourite, “Let It Be Me.”

Touch ‘Em With Love, released in 1969, has to be Gentry’s

most soulful album and it definitely warrants comparisons
with Dusty Springfield at her finest; in fact, Bobbie even
covers “Son Of A Preacher Man” on this record, which may
indicate that Dusty In Memphis was an influence.

The album presents Gentry as both a first-rate interpreter of

songs and a fine songwriter whose material sits easily with
covers of Jimmy Webb and Burt Bacharach. In fact, it could
be said that the best tracks on the whole album are her own
songs: the gospel-tinged “Glory Hallelujah, How They’ll
Sing” and the rousing “Seasons Come, Seasons Go.” The
big hit from the album, though, was her cover of “I’ll Never
Fall In Love Again,” which became her only UK number
one. The BBC was impressed enough with Gentry to
offer her her own TV show, which featured guests like the
Hollies, James Taylor and Donovan. Sadly, it’s said only
five episodes of the show still exist in the BBC’s archives,
the rest falling victim to the Beeb’s policy of wiping and
reusing old tapes at the time.

At the end of 1969, Gentry married casino magnet Bill

Harrah, who was almost 60 at the time and Bobbie just 26.
Predictably, the marriage only lasted four months, but it
certainly makes the lyrics of Gentry’s second most-famous
song, “Fancy” all the more interesting.

Released around the time of her marriage and arguably on

par with “Ode To Billie Joe,” it’s sung from the perspective
of a woman looking back at her poverty-stricken youth and
her terminally-ill mother’s advice to go out and use her
beauty to find a rich man to save her. “I may have been
born plain white trash but Fancy was my name… and I ain’t
done bad,” she defiantly sings. Once again, it’s a brilliant
character study and shows Gentry’s talent as an incredible
storyteller. “Fancy is my strongest statement for women’s
lib, if you really listen to it. I agree wholeheartedly with that
movement and all the serious issues that [it stands] for —
equality, equal pay, day care centers, and abortion rights,”
she explained to After Dark magazine in 1974. It’s by far the
best song on the album that followed in early 1970 (and the
only original on the record), which was recorded at the
legendary Muscle Shoals studio, although her version of
Harry Nilsson’s “Rainmaker” is country pop at its finest,
while “Find ‘Em, Fool ‘Em, and Forget ‘Em” features one of
her best and toughest vocals.

Around this time, she signed a million-dollar contract to

headline her own show in Vegas, where other notable acts
such as Elvis Presley and Tom Jones became close
friends. (It was even reported in the press at the time that
she and Presley were briefly an item.) “I write and arrange
all the music, design the costumes, do the choreography,
the whole thing. I’m completely responsible for it. It’s totally
my own from inception to performance,” she said in a rare
interview in the early ’70s, before adding, “I originally
produced ‘Ode To Billie Joe’ and most of my other records,
but a woman doesn’t stand much chance in a recording
studio. A staff producer’s name was nearly always put on
the records.”
It was clear Gentry was frustrated with her role as a woman
in the music business. Like Dolly Parton, she was
unashamedly glamorous, but unlike the country superstar,
Gentry largely wasn’t taken seriously as an artist. It
probably explains why she took full control — and credit —
over her next and final album, Patchwork, in 1971. Again,
this was a concept album with each song separated by a
musical interlude. Every track was written by Gentry herself
this time, and it’s said she even painted the striking portrait
on the cover.

Gentry said it was the album she was most proud of, but it’s
rumoured that male staff at Capitol felt threatened by
her push for creative control and retaliated by failing to give
it the promotion it deserved. It’s entirely possible this was
the case, as during the last ten years of her career, she was
obviously reluctant to continue as a recording artist, never
making another album and releasing her last single, “Steal
Away” b/w “He Did Me Wrong But He Did It Right,” in 1978.

The final poignant track on Patchwork, “Lookin’ In,” offers

an insight into her disillusionment with show business. “So I
spend my days thinking up new ways to do the same old
thing,” she wearily sings, before going on to tell us,
“Seasons come and go without a name, and I spend my
nights in the bright spotlights wishing I could let the people
know, can’t win or lose unless you play the game.”

During a short-lived marriage to singer and comedian Jim

Stafford, she gave birth to a son called Tyler in 1978 (in this
interview with Stafford from the mid-1980s, he mentions
Gentry and shows a photo of their son). Becoming a
mother seems to have reinforced her decision to retire from
music, only making a brief re-appearance in 1981 for the
aforementioned Mother’s Day TV special.

Since then, there have been rumoured sightings of her and

a few phone calls to old friends and colleagues (including
one to her old arranger Jimmie Haskell, where she talked
about recording some new songs that never came to
anything), but Gentry remains as mysterious as her most
famous song. It seems unlikely that she will ever come out
of retirement now and appears content to live a private life
and let her few excellent but underrated albums speak for
themselves. Here’s hoping at least for an autobiography
someday, but like the answer to what was thrown off the
Tallahatchie Bridge, she seems happy to let us all continue
to wonder.

Happy 70th birthday Bobbie Gentry, wherever you are.