We pen this in observance of several round anniversaries: the 80th birthday of country pop goddess Bobbie Gentry (Roberta Lee Streeter, b. 1942); the 70th anniversary of the Southern Gothic movie after which she named herself, Ruby Gentry (1952) with Jennifer Jones, Charlton Heston, and Karl Malden; and the 40th anniversary of the singer's retirement and "disappearance" in 1982.
The thing is, there really is no mystery to the choice she made, and she didn't really disappear. The narrative of her life goes like this. Gentry was a poor girl from rural Mississippi, who grew up on a farm with no electricity or running water. (Thus I'm already semi-primed to adore her; my father grew up in similar conditions in Tennessee). Then she moved to California to live with her mother. In addition to her musical talent, she also possessed brains and beauty, pretty much a show business trifecta. She studied philosophy at UCLA, worked as a model and a Vegas chorine, and sometimes played her songs in clubs. Her initial objective was merely to be a songwriter. Someone at Capitol heard her demo, it was released as a record, and it became a monster phenomenon, and suddenly unsought stardom became her portion. That's the gist of it.
Her first single, "Ode to Billie Joe", released in July, 1967 was an unparalleled success. It spent FOUR WEEKS in the #1 spot on the Billboard pop charts. The eponymous LP was the record that bumped Sgt. Pepper from the top of the album charts! She won Grammys. I wasn't even two years old when this all happened, but I knew vaguely about it, because her top tune never precisely went out of circulation. It was more a staple of am radio than fm, but you still heard it a lot, and then it was bumped back into prominence again in 1976 when the already highly cinematic song was turned into a movie, directed and produced by Max Baer Jr (yes, Jethro from The Beverly Hillbillies), starring the white hot Robby Benson and Glynnis O'Connor, who'd also co-starred in the movie Jeremy (1973) (O'Connor also co-starred with John Travolta in The Boy in the Plastic Bubble that same year). And that was proved a kind of climax. But there had been so much that had happened in between.
I am a rabid fan of that song, btw. It's on my iphone, I still listen to it all the time, never get sick of it. It's novelistic, Faulkneresque, and tells the story of a young man's suicide for some reason we can't get a grip on, but clearly having to do with his romance with the singer, of which her parents don't approve. The song kind of has everything. The strong story is foremost, but it is helped along by a relentless and very catchy rhythm on acoustic guitar, a soulful "black" singing style, and a powerful, brilliant and dark string arrangement by Jimmie Haskell, best known at the time for his soundtracks to westerns. And the vividness of the writing with its references to black-eyed peas, and plowing the back forty. It just hit the bull's eye, struck a chord in 1967, when the entire country was enthralled by the enigma and sordid tragedy of the American South. The Band released "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" that same year, and United Artists released In the Heat of the Night. The folk music revival was starting to dissipate but was still very much a major part of pop culture. Bob Dylan even wrote a parody of "Ode to Billie Joe", called "Clothes Line Saga", which most people wouldn't hear until The Basement Tapes were released in 1975 -- just in time for the Billie Joe movie.
You can just tell that the suits reckoned they had a gold mine in Gentry. She was so gorgeous! And so right for the moment. And so novel. She was crossover. Lots of appeal for both country music audiences and pop audiences, or so they thought. So instead of merely being a songwriter she was groomed for the limelight. She was clearly pressured to turn out lots more records -- there were three of them in 1968! But though critics continued to love her, she never clicked with the public in such a spectacular way again. Ten of her subsequent singles did hit the Hot 100, but way low down on the list. Most people have never heard them.
Why didn't they click? One critic has pointed out that she kind of fell through the cracks: too substantive and poetic for pop, but too show bizzy for a singer-songwriter. If she'd just sold the songs to other country artists as she originally intended, it would have been hunky dory. As it was, a lot of the material on her albums consists of covers, not her strong suit. Her third album features three Beatles songs! And of course she was ahead of her time. I'm not a fan of Springsteen, but Gentry's songs were not unlike those in his catalog, lyrically ambitious, regionally specific, and possessed of their own unique sound. She was artistic but not counter-cultural. And a woman, besides! This was an age when there were few women songwriters, hence her gender ambiguous Christian name. In the age of Janis Joplin and Mama Cass on the one hand, and Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn on the other, how do you market Bobby Gentry?
She collaborated with Glen Campbell on an album in 1968, and that one sold well. She appeared on The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour, and many another TV variety show: The Ed Sullivan Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, Kraft Music Hall, Bob Hope specials, The Jonathan Winters Show, The Hollywood Palace, The Johnny Cash Show, This is Tom Jones, and many others. She was especially popular in the UK, where her records charted much higher and she hosted her OWN TV variety show on the BBC (1968-71). In 1974 came her American variety show The Bobby Gentry Happiness Hour, which aired on CBS. By this time she was a well-seasoned performer. Her Las Vegas variety shows, featuring her sisters, who were billed as The Local Gentry, were a major draw. This too was confounding. She was so flashy in performance, always wearing fabulous, glamorous costumes, and yet her songs were so authentic. I'm quite certain that her example helped Elvis figure out his come-back.
OMG, look what I just found!
In the late '70s she began to wind down. In 1978 she married singer and comedian Jim Stafford and they had a son. The couple divorced two years later. Her last public performance was on a 1981 TV special called An All-Star Salute to Mother's Day. On the show, she sang "Mama, a Rainbow" from the musical Minnie's Boys -- neither you nor I dreamt we could work the Marx Brothers into this post, but there ya go! She attended the 1982 Country Music Awards. And after that, she dropped out. Like, completely. She became a Salinger-level hermit, as far as show biz was concerned anyway. And it became irresistible for writers to compare this unexplained absence to her unexplained hit song. (She always refused to divulge or clarify what it was that Billie Joe MacAllister threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge).
For three decades there weren't even any photographs of Gentry. Then, a single picture turned up in 2014. Someone must have caught her off guard, and she obliged. At that point, now in her 70s, she was still gorgeous. You can see the photo here. I really do hope she has kept writing right along. It's possible some more recent tunes are out there, published pseudonymously! At any rate, much honor to her today. She blazed a trail that led all the way from the sleepy South to the pinnacle of pop culture.
For more on show biz history, please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and stay tuned for Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.
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