I actually did do a half-slow, half-assed cover of this song, which you can listen to here, mangled lyrics and all.  File it under the “Least Essential Covers” category.  While I could justify covering “Ruby” (Week 10) on the basis that the song had become so overloaded with the chicka-chicka stuff that nobody could hear the song anymore, there’s no similar case to be made with Bobbie Gentry’s original of OTBJ, which is perfect.  There’s no reason for anybody to cover this fantastic song except (in my case) to take credit for this Week 21 (covers count) and for the self-indulgent joy of doing it; it’s a very fun song to play.

Here’s a bit of Wikipedia-lifted info about the song:  It came out in August 1967, and the album it was on knocked Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band out of the number one spot.  Bobbie Gentry (real name:  Roberta Streeter), a just-turned-23-year-old Mississippian of Portuguese ancestry, released it as the B-side of her song “Mississippi Delta.”  Reportedly there were originally eleven verses, which the producer, or somebody, persuaded her to cull to five for reasons of length.  I’ve been lying awake at night wondering what those other six verses could be. 

The reason this song doesn’t need to be re-cast in any way to free it from the burdens of its original production is because it always sounds fresh.  When you hear it come on the radio, no matter how many times you’ve heard it before, I bet you stop and listen to it.   Everything—her strangely disaffected schoolgirl voice, the slightly off-sounding chord progression (she goes to the minor seventh [maybe even a minor 11^th] instead of a major chord or dominant seventh for the “II” chord, for all you theory nerds out there), and that spooky string section—just works.  After 42 years of radio play, “Ode to Billie Joe” still transfixes.

What is the Song About?  It’s about a lot of things, as it turns out.  First it’s a domestic drama, a still-life around a family dinner table.  There’s a sense of foreboding around that dinner table.  Tension builds with each verse as mundane details are juxtaposed against the fact that a kid killed himself that morning.  The father is callous about the dead boy, the mother’s sadness is entirely pro forma (it’s “still a shame about Billie Joe anyhow”), the brother is torn between immediate adolescent nostalgia—the excitement of knowing someone who killed himself—and an impending sense that something doesn’t “seem right.” (Within a year the family will be torn apart—Papa will be dead, probably not mourned all that much; Mama will be catatonic from the emptiness of her life; brother will be a married storekeeper in Tupelo and, by implication, just another schmuck.)  Gentry, a philosophy major at UCLA, wears her literary influences on her sleeve:  She obviously knew Hemingway’s “7/8 rule” (only 1/8 of the iceberg can be seen, but the unseen 7/8 is what provides the foundation) and probably also was well-grounded in Carson McCullers and Harper Lee.  This song is first about the disintegration of a family.

But then she had those kids throw something off that bridge. 

That mystery is what has kept the song famous for over forty years and is central to its power, but what really gives the mystery resonance is its emergence from that “sleepy, dusty Delta day” setting.  Gentry is tapping into something else entirely here by putting us in the land of old ghosts, the place where bluesmen sell their souls to the devil at the crossroads.  She piles on the Southern clichés:  You have the cotton getting chopped, the hay getting baled (and how likely is it that an apparently subsistence farming family like this one would have both crops?), the mama calling for feet to be wiped, the casual Southernism (Billie Joe, we are told, didn’t have “a lick of sense”), the visiting preacher coming for Sunday dinner, and (mandatory scene in every Southern coming-of-age story ever written) the frog down the back at the picture show.  It’s by-the-numbers Southern gothic.  Surely she’s conning you, right?  All you’re really lacking is a banjo-playing necrophiliac moonshiner and you’re golden.  But brother was correct:  something in fact isn’t right. 

The song is beyond parody (Dylan tried, with “Clothes Line Saga” from The Basement Tapes; it’s pretty weak Dylan) because it parodies itself.   Just when you’re ready to call bullshit, that single skin-prickling line comes:  “And she and Billie Joe were throwing something off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”  Gentry seems to be saying, “I’ll see your banjo-playing necrophiliac moonshiner and raise you this.”  There’s room for everybody’s nightmare in whatever got thrown off that bridge.  It was Faulkner’s lifelong nightmare, Cormac McCarthy treated it at length in his first four novels, and Bob Dylan (of course) visited it from his room in the St. James Hotel in what may be his greatest stand-along song, “Blind Willie McTell.”  But only a 23 year old Mississippi gal was able to reduce it to a single blurry image of something falling from a bridge.  Nobody in that song is to be trusted.  Nothing is as it seems in those woods.  Nothing ever came to no good up on Choctaw Ridge.

 Man in the Mirror.  I hadn’t planned to do this song.  I was going to do a Michael Jackson song, since as the spokesman for my generation I felt obligated to weigh in on the death of the pop legend.  The only song I thought I might be able to pull off was “Man in the Mirror,” which I think is a very good song, but (i) there are already some very good acoustic covers of that song on youtube (here’s one of them), (ii) Michael Jackson didn’t write the song, which was news to me, and (iii) I knew in the back of my mind that I didn’t really have anything original to say about Michael Jackson. 

Though I have a great regard for Jackson’s talent—you’re blind and deaf if you don’t—I don’t really have any kind of personal connection to his music.  I’m one of the dozen or so people on Earth between the ages of 30 and 50 who never owned Thriller.  Some spokesman for my generation I turned out to be.  Without that connection, anything I might have to say would be an attempt at sociology or history, and I’m not good at those things.  It’s not that I’m not interested in what things mean in the context of their times, but I’m more interested in what things mean in the context of a particular person’s life, yours or mine.  “Like a Rolling Stone” (again with the Dylan!) was named by Rolling Stone magazine as the greatest song ever of all time, or something like that.  But what if it came out in 1989, or last year, instead of 1965?  Would it still hold that distinction?  I don’t think so.  I admire the song, but there’s a difference between admiring something and loving it.  Because its power is dependent on the context of its times (at least for me), it’s a lesser song, I think, than “Blind Willie McTell” or “Girl From the North Country,” just to name two other Dylan songs.  The greatness of those songs arises from the songs themselves, from the history behind them rather than the history they might make, and from their connection to the listener if such a connection is formed; the songs require no knowledge of Dylan’s discovery of electricity to be appreciated.  You can hear everything you need to know in the songs.  What you bring to that song with you is up to you.  The more you bring to it, the greater the reward is likely to be, but if you have nothing to bring, those songs themselves will give you something to take with you on the journey to the next song.  With “Like a Rolling Stone,” you kind of had to be there.

One thing that has been noted by a few commentators, though, has struck a chord with me:  the contention that MJ may be the last international star, the last true King of Pop (as in pop culture.)  As my friend Tom put it at lunch the other day, what other non-politician is recognizable to a kid in some remote African village as well as to your dad?  Muhammad Ali maybe, but only maybe.  Jackson’s stardom was a relic of the days when there were only a handful of channels, no internet, no streaming media, when the underground was really the underground.  Now it’s an a la carte world and pop culture is democratized to the point of inexistence.  Michael Jackson really was its last, gasping emperor.  My kids will probably never know what it’s like to have the strong and probably accurate sense that everybody in the country is listening to the same song they are listening to right now.  A few weeks ago I found some entire episodes of Flipper on the internet and let the kids watch some of them.  They loved it, but all the time I was thinking, This can’t be good; I’m sentencing them to a very lonely place.

The loss is a loss of community and a loss of innocence.  If “Ode to Billie Joe” were released now, I’m sure it wouldn’t be hit, because there aren’t any hits any more, not unless you’re an evil baby or a piano-playing cat, but that doesn’t interest or concern me much in itself.  What concerns me is that if I heard the song, just me, I’d probably like it okay, listen to it a couple of times, then move on to the next thing, because there’s lots of good stuff out there, and it would never occur to me to linger on the question:  What did they throw off that bridge?  I might drop the singer a note on her website, if her email was available, or leave a comment on the youtube video:  “Cool song.  Like the part about dropping something off the bridge.  Gives it a creepy vibe.”   And I’d never think about it again, the mystery aborted.

John Updike said (roughly paraphrased and somewhat elaborated) that he wrote his books for that weird, lonesome kid in Kansas poking around his dusty small-town public library on a boring Saturday afternoon.  He imagined that kid pulling one of Updike’s novels out randomly, opening it, reading the first page, continuing, not knowing anything at all about the author or the book prior to that moment.  That’s the moment of discovery and the moment of mystery in exact counterpoint to each other, and that alchemy is what produces revelation.  More discovery and moments of revelation will continue to occur as the kid grows older, learns more about Updike, more about where Updike fits into the American literary canon, picks up the trail through the New Yorker, discovers Cheever, finds the intersection with Hemingway, follows that path a while, takes a detour through Faulkner, finds Flannery O’Connor, finds Dylan, finds Raging Bull, finds Call Me Ishmael, finds all manner of thing.  And so on.  He’s traveling alone but not really; a community is forming around him and within him as he travels.  He arranges the world in his head as he goes.  He gives few of his books away. 

That kid can now take that whole journey in about fifteen minutes on Wikipedia, and when he’s done he’s just as weird and lonesome as before.  He heads to the porn sites.

I remember when grown men used to argue about whether pro wrestling was fake.

Flipper, for Chrissake!