BOX SET IS AN ODE TO BOBBIE GENTRY
The ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ singer turned her back on stardom, but a new box set burnishes her legend.
This is not a story about what happened to Bobbie Gentry.
Plenty have attempted to write that piece, and the mystery continues to be dissected every few years by journalists and admirers who can’t fathom (or accept) why an artist would walk away from her music career at the peak of her powers.
Contrary to popular belief, the enigmatic woman who wrote, sang and took “Ode to Billie Joe” to the top of the charts in summer 1967 is not lost. Bobbie Gentry simply does not want to be found.
Nearly 50 years after her final studio album was released, though, here we are still talking about one of pop music’s greatest vanishing acts, the star of her own ghost story.
Gentry is alive and presumably well at age 76, living back in the South, where she grew up, but she pulled off the unthinkable in the early 1980s: She disappeared. Poof !
After a stint in Las Vegas, Gentry turned her back on show business, never to return despite constant clamoring for her to do so. She left us with a trail of seven groundbreaking albums that became a road map of American roots music, bending country, soul, pop, folk, funk, jazz, show tunes and the blues to her own kaleidoscopic vision.
Since then, Gentry’s mystique, and esteem for her work, has only intensified.
“She was a strange mix of Vegas song-and-dance and dark singer- songwriter,” says Jill Sobule, a Gentry die-hard who made a splash with her 1995 hit “I Kissed a Girl” and paid her respects to her idol in 2009 with “Where Is Bobbie Gentry?” “At first I wanted to know more about the mystery of what happened to her, but now I kind of just like it for what it is.”
A lavish new box set suggests we have been asking the wrong question about Bobbie Gentry all these years. It’s not important why or how she retreated from fame: We should be more attuned to why she mattered so profoundly, particularly to female musicians who claim her as a touchstone.
Released in the U.S. on Friday, “The Girl From Chickasaw County: The Complete Capitol Masters” is the definitive document of Gentry’s brief but astonishing run from 1967 to 1971. Its eight discs collect all of Gentry’s studio albums, packaged with rare and unseen archival photos and an expansive book that chronicles her evolution from Southern storyteller to razzle-dazzle entertainer at home in multiple styles.
The mother lode for Gentry fanatics, the box set also includes 75 unreleased recordings (intimate demos, live versions, alternate takes, foreign-language renditions of her songs) and an entire album of performances recorded live at the BBC. It’s the first retrospective to lionize her as an unsung pioneer who fought for (and won) autonomy as a female songwriter, producer and arranger.
Even if you’re just discovering her, echoes of Gentry’s legacy have reverberated across genres and generations. You hear and see her in the glamour and country-pop crossover appeal of superstars Shania Twain and Carrie Underwood, in the fire-and-brimstone sermonizing of Neko Case, in the bruised vulnerability of Cat Power, in the vignettes about small-town America written by Kacey Musgraves and Brandy Clark.
“Her songwriting was not like anyone else’s,” says Andrew Batt, the British producer and archivist who curated the new box set for Capitol/UMe. “She was not a confessional songwriter. She created something new, a new identity, by specializing in these narrative character songs. But it turns out the only way people remember you or give you respect as a female songwriter is if you’re a chick with a guitar singing your heart out.”
That wasn’t Gentry’s style. Her Southern Gothic torch songs, delivered with conversational grace and economy, unfurled like William Faulkner’s short stories set to fingerpicked acoustic guitar, majestic string arrangements and blasts of swampy horns.
“Ode to Billie Joe” was her magnum opus, a journalistic account of the suicide of Billie Joe McAllister, who jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge and was seen beforehand throwing something (a baby?!) off that same bridge.
The song begins breezily enough, with Gentry marking the time and place as if jotting it down in a diary: “It was the third of June / Another sleepy, dusty Delta day.” She spins “Ode to Billie Joe” not like she’s singing into a studio microphone but rather just having a chat around the family dinner table. Indeed, there’s a fly-on-thewall sense of intimacy in her storytelling as a Mississippi family reacts to McAllister’s death with alarming nonchalance. She punctuates the story with offhand remarks — “pass the biscuits, please” — that tear down down the wall between songwriter and listener.
Gentry was so ahead of her time that the music industry didn’t quite know what to do with her.
“Bobbie is not Dusty Springfield, but she’s not Joni Mitchell either. She’s kind of in between those two things,” Batt says. “Ultimately she ends up being too esoteric for a light-entertainment crowd but too light entertainment for the singersongwriter audience.”
She wrote about her roots and contemporary life and death in the South with the gimlet eye of a compassionate narrator. And her voice was as humid as an August evening in the Delta she so often immortalized in song, smoldering with immediacy and sensuality.
Batt emphasizes that he has never met Gentry but was in touch with her through an intermediary. She was aware that the new box set was in the works but did not want to be involved.
“I think she’s fond of her legacy and interested in it, but she’s not there anymore,” he says.
In her absence, Gentry’s music has resonated largely through other artists, from Reba McEntire’s hit rendition of Gentry’s “Fancy” to the hundreds of “Ode to Billie Joe” covers.
Writers too have magnified her mythology, such as Tara Murtha’s illuminating 2014 book about Gentry’s debut album. The Washington Post tried to track down the elusive star in 2016; she promptly hung up on the reporter when he dialed her cold at her home.
Why then does Gentry still bewitch us even as she declines to be part of the discourse about her legacy?
“We live in such a celebrity-saturated age that the idea that somebody wouldn’t want to validate their persona by reappearing or even to curate their legacy — that seems strange to us,” Batt says. “But we’re talking about something that happened 40 years ago. She has moved on.”
It’s just that Gentry has made it hard for us to do the same.