What exactly did the singer and Billy Joe throw off the Tallahasee bridge? And did it have anything to do with Billy Joe jumping?
You can find a lot of past threads on this topic, including one started by me.
The answer is: No one knows and Bobbie Gentry ain’t talkin’.
I believe it’s also the Tallahachee Bridge. I think the event takes place in Mississippi and not Florida.
If Ms. Gentry had any role in the movie, that will supply your answers. To say more would be spoiling.
It’s a McGuffin. It serves the purpose of driving the plot of the story, but what exactly it is doesn’t matter.
It’s a McGuffin. It serves the purpose of driving the plot of the story, but what exactly it is doesn’t matter.
I always thought that it was a baby that they had out of wedlock. Billie Joe couldn’t take the guilt anymore.
Haj
It’s the Tallahatchie Bridge, in Northern Mississippi. It was also the site of a Civil War battle, June 15-18, 1862. There is a Tallahatchee Bridge in Alabama, at Mentone, but since the song mentions “another sleepy delta day” it pretty much ties the site to the Tallahatchie Bridge in the Mississippi delta.
Side note: Once while driving to Memphis, I unexpectedly came upon the Tallahatchie Bridge. I commented to my traveling companion: “This is the bridge Billy Joe jumped off.” She said “Whaaa?” Later, as we were approaching the Mississippi River bridge in Memphis, I pointed down off the road and said: “There’s Marie’s house”. She didn’t get that one either. We had a serious failure to communicate, not limited to bridges or music.
Back on the subject: I’ve seen several debates about what they may have been throwing off the Tallahatchie bridge, but there’s never been a definitive answer.
Best guesses; a no-longer wanted engagement ring or a stillborn fetus. Take your pick, or make up something you like better. 
Yeah, that was my first guess, too, but when you think about the lyrics, it doesn’t make much sense:
- I don’t think she could have gone nine months with child and done this deed without someone in the family noticing.
- The whole town, in fact, probably would have known she’d been pregnant. I grew up in one of those small backwoods towns, and everyone knows everything about everybody else, whether they want to or not.
Actually, thinking about it, they were probably just throwing flowers or rocks off the bridge. The whole point of mentioning throwing something off the bridge most likely wasn’t to get us to think “What went into the water?” but to establish that the singer and Billy Joe had something going on the side that they wanted to keep to themselves (And, as I said above, it’s not that easy to do in a town like this). I’d say that Bobbi Gentry didn’t even think that this question would be asked, and when it was, she decided to play coy and milk it for all it was worth. My $0.02, anyway.
Thanks for the feedback. I’d search for the threads, but neither “Ode” nor “Joe” have enough characters to search by thread titles.
There’s a book “Ode to Billy Joe” that will give you the full story behind the song. It’s out of print now, but still available through Amazon for a couple of bucks. I read it when I was a child, so I can answer some from what I remember.
I don’t know how to do the spoiler tag (if anyone wants to clue me in with a brief hijack I’d be grateful), so…
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD!!!
They were throwing flowers off of the bridge. She was the prettiest girl in the county, and he was an outcast who had family problems. They fell in love, but did not have sex because Billy Joe couldn’t go through with it. He had issues from being either raped or molested by a man in their town. After his death the girl (sorry, I can’t remember her name) notices people acting strangely towards her and finally figures out that everyone thinks Billy Joe got her pregnant when her brother crudely remarks on it. So she goes away for long enough to make people believe that she left to have a child and then returns. At some point, on the bridge I believe, she speaks to the man who sexually assulted Billy Joe. I think he’s a doctor, but I might be mistaken. He was a simple man who was genuinely sorry what he did hurt them. Like he didn’t know better in a way, but realized later it was wrong. That just made it the sublime tragedy, IMO.
flowers
At the end of the song, she says how she spends time on the bridge dropping flowers into the muddy waters off the talahatchie bridge, just like she and billie joe used to do which was witnessed by the preacher.
I thought the whole point of the song was everybody not really caring about this kid who she was in love with and how they nonchalantly discussed him around the dinner table. (pass the bisquits please)
So where’s Choctaw Ridge?
Fairblue, does the book say the story is based on a true story?
Umm, I meant the song being based on a true story, of course…
Posted by dfj750:
“I thought the whole point of the song was everybody not really caring about this kid who she was in love with and how they nonchalantly discussed him around the dinner table. (pass the bisquits please)”
I think you’re right about that: The shocked young girl sitting at the table while the biggest tragedy of her life is being discussed as if it were an insignificant afterthought; that’s the main vision I get when I hear the song.
Choctaw Ridge runs through Carroll County, Mississippi. Check it out [here]
Revtim
I don’t know, but I doubt it. I had thought that the song came from the movie which was based on the book- but it is not so. My apologies for being misleading.
The book was based on the movie which was based on the song and so apparently the question of what was actually thrown off the bridge was never answered by the author of the song, though it was in the book and the movie.
I remembered it from the book as being flowers, but that is probably not correct. According to a movie review I just read it was a doll the girl had. Also according to this movie review- found here- the movie blew chunks in a major way.
I don’t remember the book being that bad, but twenty years can dull memories of even the stinkiest garbage- YMMV.
A bit of perspective might be in order. I’ve been a pop junkie all my considerable life, and although I wasn’t able to drive when “Ode to Billie Joe” came out, I do recall the absolute sensation the song caused. My dad was a DJ, and he worked for a station that actually had the good taste to fit “Ode to Billie Joe” into the playlist. He answered innumerable questions about it, but he too had the only answer anyone got then–that the songwriter, Bobbie Gentry, had deliberately left it ambiguous so People Would Wonder.
The late 60s were a time of serious experimentation in music, of course, and the gang who had made a decent, if largely unsung, living from the moon-June-spoon genre of sappy, hummable love songs were feeling some serious pressure from the amateurs who had stumbled over unimaginable innovations in a druggie haze. It wasn’t just the Beatles and the Beach Boys: virtually every now-canonized band of the late 60s had some kind of new take on pop to offer, and the heirs of Tin Pan Alley were losing their audience. (Talk about your brave new world: just seeing The Doors in concert was enough to fuel a major war on drugs.) Having no reason not to, the powers in the music industry gave chances to people they wouldn’t have let in the door a few years earlier, and the troubadours started to enjoy some success. (Although Bob Dylan started a lot of this, his career doesn’t really enter into this particular discussion, which is not to discount his influence.) The new breed of troubadour, people who were known for writing songs for others, included Jimmy Webb (who wrote “MacArthur Park”, an unlikely hit for, of all people, Richard Harris, a classically-trained Irish actor who couldn’t really sing), the sublime Laura Nyro (value-added New York-flavored image-stacking), Bobby Goldsboro, and Bobbie Gentry, who, in many ways, was the least likely hitmaker of them all.
Gentry had been hanging out with the Nashville crowd–there was a lot less crossover in those days–and she’d caused a bit of a stir writing these weird country-flavored story songs nobody really had the courage to touch. (It was many, many years later that her extraordinary, sensitive apologia for prostitution, “Fancy”, turned into a hit–and it took the impossible-to-dislike Reba McIntire to put it over.) In an era of twang, Gentry provided the torch. In many ways, country has never looked back.
Of course, if you spend your day writing songs that you then turn over to clueless blockheads to mangle, dismember, and generally miss the point of, you get a little tired of it. The troubadours usually had their own recording contracts, and Bobbie Gentry ended up putting “Ode to Billie Joe” on an album, to the gratitude and puzzlement of an entire nation. Her smoky, rural-flavored vocal is indispensible to the story, to my mind, and it’s significant that nobody’s ever made a serious effort to cover it. The song came out and promptly took off. Nobody who heard it was able to forget the minor-key air of mysterious tragedy, made more striking by the bland way in which the family discusses the kid’s suicide, despite the fact that all the clues to their daughter’s/sister’s involvement in his life are right in front of them. (It’s also a commentary on a common 60s theme: the banal indifference of American society to suffering, as exemplified by Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement. Yeah, I know, but there was an entire decade of this stuff before disco came along and distracted everybody with the pretty whirly lights.)
Predictably, Gentry was mobbed by people longing to know exactly what it was the kids was th’owin’ off the Tallahatchee Bridge. I understand she cultivated a Mona Lisa smile during this period, and good for her. My attitude (although I was just as crazy to know when the song came out as everyone else in America) was that it didn’t matter; she’d made her point, and magnificently.
A couple of final comments: absolutely nowhere in the song did Gentry even begin to hint that the problem might have been that Billie Joe was molested by an older man. This was, instead, the plot contrived for the execrable 70s movie based (with extreme and sloppy looseness) on the song, and the book based on the movie. It was obvious that the idea of a sexual relationship between two men (in the movie, it’s played as consensual, though fueled by alcohol, and Billie Joe is suffused with a fatal sense of guilt) was the worst thing they could possibly think of. That this was one of the few (extremely rare) depictions of a same-sex relationship in American popular culture at the time, and that it was regarded as evil enough to drive a nice guy to suicide, infuriated the gay community–understandably. It’s unfortunate that, in making a movie based on a memorable song, the filmmakers settled for demonization, stereotype, and cliche. I don’t know where Bobbie Gentry was when the movie was being made, but I hope her spirit haunts the idiots responsible for denigrating a classic song, and that their penance is a lifetime of making cheesy car commercials.
“Ode to Billie Joe” caused a ruckus in an America undergoing major ferment, and it was by no means the only innovative, thought-provoking, intelligent piece of pop the era spawned. This was, after all, the time of “Midnight Cowboy”, “Hair” (also creamed in a later movie made by the clueless), and “The Graduate”, along with about a billion other examples I won’t burden you with. An interesting, unsettling time, hung between the death of a culture that richly deserved it and the birth of a world we’re still exploring–it’s hard to understand, unless you were there. Peace, man.
McJohn: Thanks for a well thought out post. If that’s an example of your work, you otta’ chime in more than eight times in three years.
Flower Power right back at ya’.
One of those idiot producers was none other than Max “Jethro Bodine” Baer, Jr.
I’ve always thought that it was a baby, live or stillborn, that they pitched off the bridge and Billie Joe killed himself because of guilt.
However, it is a classic song and one of the few modern ballads worth a damn. (I’m going to have to listen to it when I get home tonight.)
McJohn: No pop musicians may have made a serious cover, but the Jean Harris Quartet covered the song very well as a jazz instrumental.
Marinwood: Oh, God, I’d forgotten all about Max Baer, Jr. (A tribute to the power of ceaseless dedication; I’d been trying long enough.) In one of those karmic oddities, Max was the son of an American heavyweight boxing champ of the early 20th century. He turned his back on the relatively classy “Beverly Hillbillies” to go off and produce dreadful movies like “Macon County Line” (chiefly memorable, at least to me, because it was the first time I’d ever heard the word “hell” in a TV commercial; surely that was the high point of the movie). “Ode to Billie Joe” was actually one of his more sophisticated efforts (which does NOT mean that you should hunt it up and rent it; for heaven’s sake, don’t encourage them!).
Coyote: I’m not surprised that a jazz group had a bash at it; that minor-key sawing has got to be a serious temptation. Have you ever heard Kronos Quartet’s version of “Purple Haze”? I’m not allowed to play it anywhere except through headphones. It was almost thirty years after the release of the original that I heard a cover of “Son of a Preacher Man”, and that was just a snippet in an AT&T commercial. However, come to think of it, covering “Son of a Preacher Man” is sort of like colorizing “The Thin Man”; you could, of course, but why?
John Carter: Thanks for your kind comments. I normally hang out on some other boards, chiefly devoted to the craft of fiction, and the people there probably wish I’d go bother somebody else once in a while. 'Preciate the welcome.