Ode To Billie Joe: A Pride History Lesson

In 1967, the song “Ode to Billie Joe” captured the imagination of the American public. Written and performed by Mississippi native Bobbie Gentry, Ode to Billie Joe posed the question: why did Billie Joe McAllister jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge, a real location in rural Mississippi?

“Ode To Billie Joe” offered unusually strong lyrics for a pop tune. The song is set at the female narrator’s dinner table, where the young girl’s family questions why Billie Joe killed himself as they engage in mundane dinner table conversation: “Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please….”

Listeners never do find out why Billie Joe jumped off the bridge, though Gentry does reveal that the narrator continues to make pilgrimages to the bridge so she can throw flowers off of it into the muddy water below.

“Ode to Billie Joe” stood out as a haunting, almost ghostly, Southern Gothic tale of madness and death. The song rose to #1 on the pop charts and garnered several Grammy Awards for Gentry, who was then 23 years old.

Ten years later,“Ode To Billie Joe” was adapted as a film. Robby Benson, then a teen idol, starred as Billy Joe McAllister (the spelling of the character’s first name was changed to the more traditional “Billy” for the film). Glynnis O’Connor, at the time Benson’s girlfriend, was cast as Bobbie Lee Hartley, the song’s unnamed narrator. The couple had previously co-starred in Jeremy (1973), a popular teen romance of the era.

When Bobbie Gentry met with screenwriter Herman Raucher, she told him that “Ode to Billie Joe” was based on a true-life incident from her hometown, admitting that she had no idea why Billie Joe had jumped off the bridge. This gave Raucher a great deal of leeway in creating the film’s storyline. What Raucher came up with is a sad, heartfelt reminder of how bad things were for LGBTQ people during the generations which preceded ours.

Ode to Billy Joe was released to theaters on June 4, 1976. The film took viewers back to a sweltering hot Mississippi summer in 1953, where the adorably nerdy Billy Joe is “courting” Bobbie Lee. She feigns disinterest, though it soon becomes apparent that she’s falling for her goofy “gentleman caller.”

Throughout the film, Raucher drops hints of what is to come. After a night of drunken partying, Billy Joe’s buddies take him to a “house of ill repute.” His friends eagerly dive into the pleasures which the house offers. Billy Joe, by contrast, not only seems disinterested, he appears to be genuinely frightened.

Eventually the audience find out what it is that terrifies him.

“Something bad happened, Bobbie Lee,” he says late one night. “Something real bad.”

The distraught young man admits that he had spent the night with a man. The following morning, his dead body is found floating in the river beneath the bridge. Ten years after “Ode To Billie Joe” sold millions of records, Gentry’s audience finally found out why Billie Joe McAllister jumped off the  Tallahatchie Bridge: he was ashamed of being gay.

Bobby Lee kept his secret. As the film draws to a close, she helps to spread a false rumor that she’s pregnant with Billy Joe’s baby — better to be known for the sin of premarital sex than for the gravest sin of all: homosexuality.

Today, Ode to Billy Joe stands as a stark reminder of how far we’ve come. Our battles are far from over: we certainly have our work cut out for ourselves as we stand up to the virulently anti-gay Trump administration.

But the days of the deep shame Billy Joe felt in 1953 Mississippi are indeed behind us. LGBTQ people are very much a part of today’s mainstream pop culture landscape. Openly LGBTQ people are now serving as elected officials across the country. Marriage equality remains the law of the land.

We have fought many long and difficult battles to get from where Billy Joe McAllister was in 1953 to where we are now. No matter what Donald Trump does, we will never have to go back to those days.

And that’s something that each one of us can take a great deal of Pride in.