You all know the song Ode To Billie Joe, ‘Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge‘. It’s without doubt one of the most popular Country songs and was a big hit for Bobbie Gentry in 1967 but what does it all mean?
The places mentioned in the song, the Tallahatchie Bridge and the evocative sounding Choctaw Ridge and most others all exist in the state of Mississippi in southern America. The song, too, hints at a terrible tragedy but does not seem to give enough detail for you to actually work out what the relationship of the singer is to Billy Joe.
First off, the title to the song is spelt Billie Joe and this leads people, at least in the UK, to suppose that Billie is a girl (as with Billie Piper and others) where, in fact, the character is a man.
With that out of the way, and I only discovered that recently, the song has a different story within it but it still, annoyingly, doesn’t let you work out what happened.
I noticed in the shops this last weekend in the UK that there was the start issue of a series (either weekly or monthly, I’m not sure) of a magazine which features episodes from the Bonanza TV series of the 1960s.
A Western, but a family entertainment Western, maybe more of a Western soap. Bonanza went down so well in the 1960s that it ran throughout the decade and then into the 1970s making it one of the longest running Westerns.