So… I was listening to the 1967(?) song by Bobbie Gentry, “Ode To Billy Joe”, and was once again set to wondering just what the heck they were throwing off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and if it had anything to do with why poor, lamented Billy Joe committed suicide.
I read the IMDb synopsis of the movie but that doesn’t seem to address the question of what was chucked off the bridge. Likewise, Billy Joe’s supposed sexual confusion isn’t mentioned in the lyrics of the song.
Any thoughts? What was Billy Joe’s problem? And how was the nice young girl who tells the story involved?
You see… I figured that. But my archive search turned up nothing that seemed to be on point, and a general Google turned up lots of stuff about the flick, but very little about the tune…
If you could point me to one of those old threads, it’d be much appreciated.
He chucked a baby off the bridge…the story is told from the point of view of the Billy Joe’s girlfriend. She had a baby…he tossed it …then the guilt got to him and he jumped.
I’ve thought if it was a baby, it was one aborted, miscarried or premature early enough to have been born w/o anyone noticing she was pregnant.
There was another song with a mystery attached I was wondering about the other day. Anyone have any idea what that was? (It wasn’t “Freshmen” or “Brick”.)
The quote in Ferret Herder’s post is pretty much the last word.
But I always assumed Billie Joe and Bobbie Sue were throwing flowers from the bridge. Bobbie Sue’s singing (in the last verse) about picking flowers and throwing them into the river, seemed to spell it out.
I assumed he loved her, but she didn’t love him back, thought they were just friends.
After his death, reprising the activity they’d shared seemed a bittersweet way of mourning him.
“And me, I spend a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”
…means that she spends a lot of time having sex up on Choctaw Ridge and throwing the subsequent babies off the bridge. Well, less boring than golf, I suppose…
Well, Bobby Gentry should have expected that everyone would miss her point about samll town indifference and search for clues. She was writing a 1960’s social commentary song (not unknown in C&W; “Harper Valley PTA” also springs to mind), but this ran counter to a much older genre, the Appalacian Murder Ballad. AMB’s are full of infantacides and suicides and murdered girlfriends and gallows lamentations. Precious little homosexuality, though; which may be why the movie producers chose to use it and thereby distance themselves from the familiar themes.
Billy Joe did not jump off the bridge, he was thrown!
He discovered that it was a space alien that fired the shot that killed JFK from the grassy knoll and that the alien was hired by the Cubans. A young operative for the CIA, in order to prevent all out war, sent a young Bill Clinton to kill Billy Joe.
Last time I posted to a similar thread, some poster with an association called ‘Chicks With Balls’ asked why I hadn’t recognised the homosexual thread in the song. I just sort of liked the music.
