Posted on 06/02/2015 10:07:16 PM PDT by re_nortex
fabulous song....and American original....
Thanks for the memories. Song got a lot of airplay,
Robby Benton played billyjoe in the movie.IIRC.Loved this song.
I so enjoyed this being posted last year. Don’t know if it was you that did but it really went to me. Was actually just thinking of it yesterday, unaware of the exact day or what month even, lol, I do not know the lyrics that well.
Nice to hear this haunting song again. Really makes a summer memory.
Delta Dawn, What’s that flower you have on
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by
Radio stations held contests. Who had the best guess of what was thrown off the bridge. Though Bobby Gentry never said, most think they were throwing a dead baby in the water.
An interesting note is Bobby Gentry grew up in L.A. She had relatives from the South be never spent much time there.
The movie was made PC, even back then. Billy Joe killed himself because he’d had a homo experience. That was NOT in the song.
Nice to hear this haunting song again. Really makes a summer memory.
Yep, lil' ol' me again. :) It's become an annual tradition and I think this is maybe my fifth year of doing so. When I see the calendar change on my computer to 03 June (CDT), I invariably think of the first line, "It was the third of June..."
Glad you like it, and unless the powers that be feel otherwise, I'll do it again on the third of June...2016...when Senator Ted Cruz ought to be well on his way to the election!
Ping to a couple of FReepers for clarification on this. As far as I can determine, she was born in Mississippi and was there, in the Delta region, through the age of 13.
I'd a drank her bath water plenty...
Thanks for the memories
You loved her as a boy?
Weirdo...
LOL
The clue is right in here, 2 times:
[’n’ Mama said to me “Child, what’s happened to your appetite?”
“I’ve been cookin’ all morning and you haven’t touched a single bite”
“That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today”
“Said he’d be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way”
“He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge”]
and here
[And me, I spend a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge]
That was such a great song and so different from everything else on the radio at the time. I don’t think there’s been another like it.
Last June 3rd there was another Ode to Billy Joe thread and someone posted an explanation of the song supposedly from Bobbie Gentry, although given many years later. The song, she said, was not about whatever was thrown from the bridge, or even about Billy Joe. The song was about the flow of life and death, and the casual way in which Billy Joe’s death was discussed over dinner along with other minutia and the general lack of interest it provoked.
My dad loved her too
I was 9 or 10
He was an old man in 1967 or at least he seemed it to me
All of 32 or 33
Robbie Benson......
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