I’m-a confuse: does the first line of the song establish it’s set in Louisiana? Which other Delta could it be? Can you have a sleepy, dusty day in that part of Louisiana–isn’t the whole area swamp-ish? Help!
Per author David Cohn in Where I Was Born and Raised,
The Mississippi Delta region refers to that part of the State of Mississippi that would flood during the spring rains.
Carroll County, Mississippi, is a little bit east to be included in the Delta region, but the Tallahatchie River flows into the Yazoo River, generally accepted to be the southern edge of the Delta, where it runs into the Mississippi River at Vicksburg.
I’ve also heard that it shines like a national guitar.
mmm
excavating, thanks for the much-needed geography lesson–I learned somethin’. And that quote from David Cohn almost made me spit my drink all over the keyboard–priceless.
Are we really sure that the narrator of the song is a girl?
"Momma said to me, ‘Girl, what’s happened to your appetite? I been cooking all morning, and you haven’t touched a single bite.’ "
So, yeah. We pretty much are.
Now, here’s an example of unconscious bias - do we know what race this family is? I’d always assumed white, but that could be subtle racism on my part. Well, and Bobby Gentry being white and singing this in first person. But there’s no reason they couldn’t all be African-American.
The line about the boys dropping a “frog down my neck” is a pretty strong indicator. Guys wouldn’t generally do that to other guys.
That’s the hardest I’ve laughed at that forced meme in all these years.
Plus, “…gave me an indian burn, a noogie, and a killer wedgie, at the Carroll County picture show” doesn’t scan as well.
The Tallahatchie Bridge is in northern Mississippi, dang near to Memphis, as is Tupelo. And the Mississippi delta stretches a long way.
I believe the line is actually “Child, what happened to your appetite?” Which would be less than definitive. HOWEVER, later on she paraphrases Brother Taylor as saying he “saw a girl who looked a lot like you” up on the ridge with Billie Joe. So unless there is a great deal more gender ambiguity than we would expect, the narrator is definitely female.
As for race, I assumed the family was black when I first became familiar with the song (not sure how old I was, but young teenage years somewhere). Two reasons:
*I knew the song was about Mississippi, either because of the Delta reference (I was good at geography) or because someone told me. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, and I knew lots of kids who had grandparents in Mississippi or whose aunts were coming up from Mississippi to visit or who spent the summer with their Mississippi cousins, and they were all of them black. So I associated Mississippi with African Americans as a kind of default.
*Growing up, I had a significant connection with a grand total of one white person with a “Southern accent”–my grandmother, who lived nearly all her life in Georgia and North Carolina and didn’t sound at all like the singer. The “African American accent” around me sounded closer to Gentry’s accent than my grandmother’s. Thus, African Americans again.
I was actually kind of surprised to discover some time later that Gentry was white.
So whatever happened to Robbie Benson (Billy Joe McAllister)?
Don’t bother. Robbie Benson, né Robin David Segal, b. 1/21/56, per (dated) Wiki,
"His 2007 novel Who Stole the Funny?: A Novel of Hollywood[10] landed Benson on the LA TImes Bestseller list. Benson’s medical memoir, “I’m Not Dead… Yet!”, was released in June 2012.[11]
Benson has been a professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, the University of Utah and the University of South Carolina.[12] It was announced he would serve as a professor of Practice in the fall of 2013 at Indiana University.[13]"
You’re right. I mis-remembered the lyric. Good catch.
As for the accent, I heard that as a white Deep South accent. Subtly different from a black Deep South accent. So I expected Gentry to be white.
I was surprised Dusty Springfield (“Son of a Preacherman”) was, though.
Back when he was a “teen idol,” Robbie Benson’s voice was like nails on a blackboard. So, years later, I’m reading the credits for Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast,” and who is the voice of the Beast? Robbie Benson!! And damn fine work, too!
AND I MISSED IT? People this is what CS is for. I can’t remember everything.
And that’s her playing on the single. Could she get any hotter?
Undoubtedly the plot of the movie made from the song is somewhere on the intertubes, but my recollection across 40 years is that Billy Joe was so distraught because messing around with another boy in a haypile stirred up some feelings he had been taught that he shouldn’ta oughta ever have had.
I just have to jump in here and say that the strings on the original Ode recording were arranged by Jimmie Haskell, someone who I admire greatly for such contributions. Listen to the song again, paying particular attention to the strings – they aren’t your garden-variety loosey-goopy backgrounds.
I was lucky enough to work for Haskell for one album (not this one). He started writing the string arrangements for 3 songs in the late evening, and by 6AM had them all done. This gave him time to take a short nap before the 9AM recording date, but required the copyist (me) to hustle his ass off to make the same deadline. During the night, each time Haskell finished one chart, he messengered it over to me to extract the parts for the individual instrument sections (violin, viola, cello). I got them copied just in time to deliver them to the studio.
I remember asking him if I should expand his “chromatic string sweep from C to C’” shorthand to the exact notes that implied, which would have required a lot of notes. He said, “Naw, just use the shorthand and the players will figger it out on the fly. They’re used to me!”
The strings were awesome, but weren’t they added to Gentry’s awesome demo?
FTR: I do not consider “sweetening” to be more than making a single easier to market.