A Brief Musical Interlude

One of my favorite tunes that my mother used to play for me is Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe," a bluesy ballad whose meaning has been disputed since its release. There was even a movie about it at one point. There isn't much in the way of analysis available online, except for this piece that does a good job of telling us what the song isn't.

At first glance, it does appear that the song is about two young lovers discarding their baby off of a bridge, and the father later killing himself over the grief. The above article pretty much discounts that, but the author takes a rather rosy view of the song which, although can be substantiated in the lyrics, is only one reading. I've always heard something a little more sinister in these words, whether it's the bits about "nothing good ever happening on Choctaw Ridge," or just the dark, sultry way Bobbie Gentry sings the song. Living in the South, one of the things I began to recognize is that Southerners communicate as much with the things they do not say as the things they do say, and there is certainly something more going on in the song than meets the eye. I doubt it was simply the narrator rejecting Billie Joe, and I doubt it was latent homosexuality as portrayed in the film. The baby solution seems suspect as well, only because it would have been next to impossible for the teenaged daughter of poor farmers in the Mississippi delta to conceal a pregnancy from her family and then kill the baby, or have it die on her and dump its body.

However.

The song came out in the 1960s, when abortion was still illegal (and the movie sets the action in the 1950s). A more likely, if darker, reading of the lyrics is that the narrator did indeed get pregnant, but decided to terminate the pregnancy rather than face the shame of her family (and society), who obviously don't care for Billie Joe and are likely too poor to have to deal with another hungry mouth. Abortion would have been performed either by a back-alley doctor or one of those ambiguous people to whom you go to take care of these kinds of "problems," or worse, she might have tried to induce a miscarriage.

Either way, if they threw the fetus off the bridge to try to dispose of it, and then Billie Joe killed himself over the guilt (perhaps he was the one that convinced her to go through with the abortion), the song makes a little more sense. Unfortunately, we don't hear much from the narrator's point of view in the way of emotional response (just her mother talking about her not eating dinner, which is most likely a response to the news that Billie Joe killed himself), so it's difficult to tell if she's as wracked by guilt as he is. We do know she doesn't kill herself, but she spends her time throwing flowers off the bridge, conjuring an image of a half-crazy woman weeping not only for a lost love, but for a lost child.

Hey, it makes sense to me, and work has been slow this week.