Dear Vance,
Whatever happened to the singer Bobbie Gentry, who gained international fame with the hit, “Ode to Billie Joe”?
— S.W., Memphis.
Dear S.W.: I’m happy to report that, at age 72, she is still alive and well and living in West Tennessee. I have her address — after all, the Lauderdales know just about everybody — but promised her I would keep it a secret.
Most of her older friends know her as Bobbie Lee Streeter, because that is her real name. Born on July 27, 1944, on a little farm outside the town of Woodland in Chickasaw County, Mississippi (about two hours southeast of Memphis), Bobbie spent her early years living with her grandparents after her parents split up. Her life is peppered with unusual stories. It seems that one day her grandmother traded a cow for a piano, for reasons nobody has ever bothered to explain, and that’s where Bobbie first learned music. The story goes that, at the age of 7, she composed her first song, a little ditty called “My Dog Sergeant Is a Good Dog” — using only the black keys, because that’s how she watched the church pianist play.
In a 1973 Mid-South magazine cover story, she remembered, “When I was still very young, I used to sit and listen to jazz music and blues music from New Orleans on an old battery-powered radio, since we didn’t have electricity on the farm. Then I’d go over to the piano and try to pick out the tunes.” For a few years, she lived in Greenwood, while attending high school there, where she learned to play the guitar and banjo.
Now, right about here, everyone assumes that Bobbie stayed in Mississippi, which served as the source of most of her songs. In fact, at age 13, she moved to Palm Springs, California, to live with her mother. Even more surprising, to me, is that she earned a degree in philosophy from UCLA and also studied at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music — which is sort of at odds with the “Delta Woman” image most people have of her. Perhaps that’s why biographers seem to have such a hard time describing her; various writers have called her articulate, contradictory, phenomenal, torrid, wistful, sleek, contemplative, intellectual, sophisticated, and even “perfectly normal.” Faced with such a complex and larger-than-life personality, a Memphis Press-Scimitar reporter simply gave up and wrote, “Bobbie Gentry is quite somebody.”
Yes, he called her Gentry — not Streeter. She picked up her stage name from a 1952 film she saw on television called Ruby Gentry. It seemed a good fit. “My mother’s name is Ruby,” she told a reporter, “and I was intrigued with that movie and started using that name. I like it still.”
In California, Bobbie had a brief career modeling swimsuits, and in the evening sang and danced at nightclubs in Los Angeles before she decided to try her hand at writing her own songs. One day, she was looking through some journals and found a cryptic notation, “Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie River Bridge.” By morning she had the song written. She pitched it to several studios, and Capitol bought the rights and recorded it. After just four weeks on the airwaves, it soared to number one, where the haunting lyrics helped it become an international hit. Almost overnight the woman from Chickasaw County, Mississippi, was a superstar, prompting a Hollywood writer to proclaim, “Bobbie Gentry is the most exciting thing to happen to popular music since the Beatles.”
Released in 1967, the song was regarded as controversial, with listeners having to decide for themselves what, exactly, did Billie Joe and his girlfriend throw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and why did Billie Joe commit suicide the very next day? Bobbie herself has always declined to answer those questions, but in one interview she admitted that the most popular guesses from listeners were flowers, a draft card, a wedding ring, and even a baby.
In an interview with Herman Raucher, who would write a 1973 screenplay based on the song, called Ode to Billy Joe (yes, the Billie/Billy name was spelled that way, and I don’t know why), Bobbie said these details weren’t relevant. The song was mainly “an illustration of a group of people’s reactions to the life and death of Billie Joe.” Even so, it earned her three Grammy Awards and in 2001 was named by Rolling Stone one of the “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.”
The success even took Bobbie by surprise. She told The Commercial Appeal, “I anticipated some success for the song in the South, but I was astonished when it became a hit all over the country, and then in Europe.” The song was included in an album of the same name, and the following year, in 1968, Bobbie released a second compilation, called The Delta Sweete. That album didn’t chart as well as her first, but Bobbie cried all the way to the bank, since she soon starred in a full-production Las Vegas show complete with an 18-piece orchestra and backing rock band, started her own record and stage production company called Gentry Ltd, developed a line of clothes, and moved into a 30-room Spanish-style mansion in the Hollywood Hills.
In 1969, she starred in a variety show on American television called The Bobbie Gentry Happiness Hour, hosted a music show in Great Britain, taped specials for Canadian television, and was a regular guest on Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, and the Smothers Brothers.
She continued to write and produce her own songs, telling Mid-South magazine, “I don’t really have a great time doing it, but I have a need to write. I am driven to being industrious, and the finished product is well worth the effort.”
Although she once told a fan magazine that her work left her no time for romance, she married Las Vegas casino owner William Harrah, but the relationship lasted only six months. She also had brief marriages with a Los Angeles businessman and singer/comedian Jim Stafford.
Bobbie Gentry eventually released more than 20 albums, including a duet with Glen Campbell called All I Have To Do Is Dream. Nothing quite matched the success of her very first song, “Ode to Billie Joe.” But how could it? That’s a tough act to follow. “It’s a distinct problem when your first hit record has the impact that one did,” she told an entertainment writer. “Capitol Records wanted me to write a follow-up, or an answer to it, but I chose not to. I decided that the proper thing was not to duplicate it, but to go on to something else.”
Over the years, Bobbie performed several times in Memphis, as you might expect. One of the highlights, she said, of her career, was a special performance with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra in 1967. Here’s what Commercial Appeal critic Robert Jennings, who called her “the phenomenon of this year and maybe a good deal longer,” said about that: “Her clear voice, with just a dash of huskiness, is ideal for the haunting imagery and quiet melancholy of the songs she writes. She mixes a blues and country style, has abundant stage gracefulness and poise, and often evokes a sense of beauty far beyond her striking good looks.”
Bobbie essentially retired from show business in 1978, with an appearance on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson the last time most people would ever see her perform. For the past 30 years or so, biographers usually say she “enjoys a private life.”
By the way, if you’re wondering what happened to that famous Tallahatchie River Bridge? Located close to Greenwood, Mississippi, it collapsed in June 1972.
Got a question for Vance?
Email: askvance@memphismagazine.com
Mail: Vance Lauderdale, Memphis magazine, 460 Tennessee Street #200, Memphis, TN 38103