Is there a more iconic ballad than Ode to Billie Joe. The tale of how “Billie Joe MacAllaster jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge” is to me the epitome in storytelling through song. Bobbie Gentry wrote and performed this song which would knock the Beatles “All You Need is Love” out of the top spot on the Billboard charts. When Gentry released an album by the same name it overcame “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” to become #1. Gentry won two awards at the 1967 Grammies: Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance. The song was named one the 500 greatest songs of all-tine by Rolling Stone magazine and Gentry would eventually be inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Whatever Happened to Bobbie Gentry? We don’t really know. In the early 1980’s she decided to adopt a private life and has made no public appearances or statements. Prior to that decision, Gentry had a creative and diverse entertainment career, one that belies the thought that this woman, who was partly raised by Mississippi grandparents who traded one of their cows to get her a piano, was some one-hit wonder hick country singer.

While never again reaching the commercial heights of Ode to Billie Joe, Gentry produced seven albums. Perhaps the best known song of her post ‘Ode’ career is Fancy. Gentry recorded it herself but it later became a huge hit for Reba McEntire.

In udiscovermusic.com  (April 6, 2023), Jeanette Leech describes the song as “a tense, often unsympathetic portrait of the lack of choice poor women have in America. It’s also a powerful critique of one of the only ways a woman could earn good money and mix in the company of powerful men – as their courtesan.”

She quotes Gentry saying “‘‘Fancy’ is my strongest statement for women’s lib, if you really listen to it. I agree wholeheartedly with that movement and all the serious issues that [it stands] for – equality, equal pay, day-care centers, and abortion rights.”

In Rolling Stone magazine (Aug. 21, 2017) Tara Murtha offers this summary of Gentry’s career:

“Producing a hit record was only the beginning of her pioneering career. Gentry was the first woman to host a variety show on the BBC (later, she hosted her own show on CBS). She was a DJ on Armed Forces Radio. It’s widely believed she painted the portraits used as the covers for her albums Fancy and Patchwork. After leaving Capitol, she headed to Las Vegas, where she spent a decade creating and starring in shows critically acclaimed for over-the-top set design, outrageous costumes she often designed herself and stellar choreography – including a gender-bending tribute to Elvis Presley, performed in a skintight glittering pantsuit.  The real Bobbie Gentry was not a country bumpkin pin-up who lucked into one big hit, as she was sometimes described in profiles that read as condescending from a modern perspective. Bobbie Gentry embraced the success of ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’ but spent the rest of her career trying to transcend the hillbilly persona that was created with it.”

Rick Hall, a well-known producer at Muscle Shoals worked with Gentry and produced Fancy. In an interview with Billy Watkins of the (Jackson, Miss.) Clarion Ledger, Sept.18, 2019, he offered this recollection: 

“I was expecting this Southern, backwoods, Delta woman. She was anything but that. Sophisticated. Bright. She had studied at UCLA and then studied music and composition (at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music). We hit it off and became really good friends, in a professional way. She and I were raised the same way so we spoke the same language.”

What Gentry was not very successful at was marriage. Her first marriage, in 1969, was to Bill Harrah of casino fame. It lasted four months. She married Thomas Toutant in 1976 and divorced him in 1978. That same year she married singer and comedian Jim Stafford. They had a son together, but divorced in just short of two years.

Gentry did know how to take care of her money and retain the rights to her music. She also got a 10% cut on the proceeds from a movie that was based on “Ode to Billie Joe.” She was one of the original owners of the Phoenix Suns basketball team.

In 1981 she performed a song as part of a TV special “An All-Star Tribute to Mother’s Day.” It would be her last public performance. The following year she attended the Academy of Country Music Awards. After that she pulled down the shades. The public has not seen her since.

In his interview, Hall said, “I can sort of understand why she quit music and went into seclusion. She had a lot of bad memories of the music business. She didn’t like the way things worked with record companies and all that. Didn’t like what she was getting paid.”

Various musicians, collaborators and journalists have tried to track down Bobbie Gentry, who would have turned 82 on July 27 of this year. The one who thinks he came the closest to finding her is Washington Post reporter Neely Tucker. He offered this story (June 2, 2016) :

“Bobbie Gentry lives about a two-hour drive from the site of the Tallahatchie Bridge that made her so famous, in a gated community, in a very nice house that cost about $1.5 million. Her neighbors, some locals and some real estate agents know who she is, although it’s not clear which of her many possible names she goes by.

“Today, computer databases clearly show that perhaps the nation’s most reclusive pop star lives in an 8,000-square-foot house with a great pool not all that far from the old homestead. Real estate agents confirmed it.

“So, yesterday, I found myself looking at a phone number on my computer screen for several seconds. No reporter, to the best of my knowledge, has spoken to Gentry in decades.

“I punched the numbers.

“After a few rings, a pleasant woman’s voice said: ‘Hello.’

“I introduced myself and my newspaper. I said I was looking for the person whose name appears on the property owner’s record.

“There was a dead pause of several seconds. My fingers clenched open and closed.

“‘There’s no one here by that name,’ she said, finally.

“I apologized and started to read back the number, to make sure I had dialed it correctly, and she hung up.

“But there isn’t really any doubt.

“I talked, for about 13 seconds, to Bobbie Gentry.

“Some mysteries can be solved. What Billie Joe and his girlfriend threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge? No. That can’t.”

“Known forever as the voice behind the haunting classic ‘Ode to Billie Joe,’ Delta lady Bobbie Gentry is the J.D. Salinger of Deep South pop. She came, burned incredibly bright and disappeared, abandoning the business and declining every interview request for decades since.” (Jeff Myers, Buffalo News, Aug. 6, 2004)

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