Credit to Jon Pennington for the Quora post, link to the museum and the transcription of the lyrics.
Sally Jane Ellison’s been missing since the first week in June. People don’t see Sally Jane in town any more. There’s a lot o’ speculatin’, she’s not actin’ like she did before. Some say she knows more than she’s willin’ to tell. But she stays quiet and a few think it’s just as well. No one really knows what went on up on Choctaw Ridge the day that Billy Jo McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
What happened? Did she leave town willingly? Was she a victim? Was she pregnant by rape or by Billie Jo (with no ‘e’) Was she a witness to something that happened to Billy Jo. Did he do something? Did he kill her? Was he gay like in the movie and novel? Was Sally Jane the one with Billie Jo on the bridge and not the singer of the song?
Bracketing off the notion that there’s a “right answer”…
Well, riffing on the notion that Billy Joe Mc had had sex with a guy, that doesn’t make him gay (any more than having had sex with a guy makes a gal hetero). But it likely indicates he was a person whose gender and/or sexual orientation identity was not well defined, and in that time frame would have been perhaps more disturbing for him than if he had specifically known himself to be exclusively gay.
Ol’ Billy may have put a lot of passion and energy into trying to develop a relationship with gals that would put to rest these concerns and uncertainties, and in the process made pregnancies happen.
We don’t know what dark tale Bobbie Gentrie was hinting at, or if she had a specific one or more of an inclination to conjure imagery in a certain territory and let our imaginations do the rest. The filmmakers who did the movie fleshed out some of that. But looking back, they too leave room for multiple interpretations, as we no longer think of people as either straight or gay; we’re more aware that people can be uncertain and explore multiple possibilities; and history tells us that a lot of possibilities outside of masculine hetero would have been disparaged as just wrong, and that valuation would have been internalized by anyone trying to sort out who they were.
The wiki includes conversations with Bobbie Gentry where she said the original lyrics (with or without the OP’s stanza) were deliberately ambiguous. There IS no right answer. On purpose.
Or at least that’s Bobbie Gentry’s story and she’s sticking to it.
I can see why that verse was edited from the song. It doesn’t add anything necessary to the story, and introduces a superfluous character that is much better portrayed as the narrator herself who picks flowers and drops them off the Tallahatchie Bridge.
No. This first sentence implies and then the second explicitly says that Billie Joe is male:
And brother said he recollected when he, and Tom, and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn’t I talkin’ to him after church last Sunday night?
While the draft uses the ambiguous Billy Jo, it includes the line “That McAllistor boy was always wild, pass the biscuits please”
Just another layer of how the song and the intentional mystery surrounding it evolved, AFAIK this wasn’t necessarily the first draft. Outstanding writing Bobbie!
. . . besides which, the apocryphal verse doesn’t seem to have the right rhyming pattern. Is there an extra line, or a line missing, to form a couplet with the first line shown above?
[baseless speculation]
Sure, Billie Joe was guy, but maybe Billy Jo wasn’t.
[baseless speculation/]
I think the lyrics are kind of a Rorschach test, think about what you imagine it’s all about, maybe it reveals something about your own experiences in life. Or not, sad stories are a common country theme, and it’s pretty clever to leave out the crucial detail.
Yeah, I tried to sing it to the melody, and it just didn’t work.
In songwriting, is the usual thing to have the melody first, and then fit words to it? I’ve written some parody songs, so I’ve always had the tune first. But I’m not sure what happens with original melodies.
Given that the actual title of the song is Ode to Billie Joe and there is nobody named “Billy Jo” anywhere in the published lyrics, I’ll suggest that’s an especially baseless speculation.
In the handwritten lyrics the OP linked to there is a spelling of “Billy Jo”. But down at the bottom of that page there’s a couple lines:
Daddy said pass me the cornbread and the blackeyed peas
That McAllister boy was always wild pass the biscuits please
That stanza didn’t survive in exactly that format into the final version. But it does add to the weight of evidence that Billie Jo(e), however spelled, was male.
It depends on the writer(s). Bernie Taupin wrote the words that Elton John set to music. George Gershwin usually wrote the melodies before Ira wrote words to them. And some use both methods.
My gut feeling is that Gentry wrote the words to OtBJ first. Anyone have the facts?
I always assumed that songwriting must be an iterative process, in which the lyrics and the melody are repeatedly adjusted to produce a better and better fit.
It may be baseless but ‘Billy Jo’ is right there in the new found early lyrics that are spurring the speculation. Billy Jo might have been a young woman before he was a young man.
Might Billie Jo(e) have changed genders a time or two before publication? Sure. But as the rest of my post you quoted shows, that interpretation was unlikely even at the time of those handwritten lyrics due to unambiguous other text on the very same piece of paper.
Might “Billie Jo” have been male all along with inconsistent spelling before publication? Sure. But handwritten notes of all sorts are famously full of spelling errors and impromptu abbreviations.
I’m not even sure we can say as a matter of real world reality that every live person who spells their name “Billie Joe” is male and every “Billie Jo” is female. Even ignoring any atypically gendered folks with such names.
Sure, but then you linked your conclusion to words in the final version of the song. I will continue to baselessly speculate that Gentry considered a female character named Billy Jo for the song. I will keep doing that because I am both bored and fed up with the world and pointless argument about inconsequential matters is one of the few things that still amuse me.