f68 Gentry Does It
The release of a sumptuous, career-defining boxed set allows an overview of an underrated artist forever defined by her first release. Tim Chipping pens an ode to Bobbie Gentry.
B
obbie Gentry is not a great lost artist. She’s no Karen Dalton or Judee Sill, departing life before attention could be paid. Nei- ther is she a Vashti Bunyan or
Shelagh McDonald, returning decades later to overdue appreciation. Despite 37 years of uninterrupted reclusivity, hers remains a household name thanks to one song, one she wrote and performed in 1966 on her first demo tape, intending it to be sung by someone else. Bobbie Gen- try will forever be known for Ode To Bil- lie Joe, the multiple-Grammy-winning, US number one that launched the career of Roberta Lee Streeter from Mississippi, whose grandma swapped a cow for a piano. It was a career Bobbie successfully steered to tremendous critical and finan- cial success with her own TV series on the BBC, a Las Vegas residency and a film based on the song that started it all.
And yet the release of a new box set containing Bobbie’s entire output for Capitol Records, along with a sumptuously compiled book of photographs and new sleeve notes makes it remarkably clear that Gentry may well be the most under- rated singer and songwriter of the 1960s.
1967
With her seven albums (and an additional disc of Beeb recordings) presented as a complete opus, what emerges is a supremely gifted musician whose work bordered on genius.
She wrote with the sophisticated sim- plicity of Lennon & McCartney, imagining her albums as orchestrally linked suites with the kind of audacity that marked the likes of Jimmy Webb and Bob Gaudio as mavericks. Musically, the songs of Bobbie Gentry are a gumbo of southernness; country, bluegrass, blues, gospel, jazz and soul inseparable from one another. She sang using the same deft command of tim- ing and microtones as Dionne Warwick, laced with the sensuality of Nancy Sinatra (the Bobbie in these songs might never have missed chapel but she’s no kinder- garten teacher). On the most rewarding recordings, produced by Capitol staffer Kelly Gordon, Gentry is close-miked so that she’s whisper-singing in your ear; you’re right there.
The America Bobbie Gentry sings of and from is a rose-tint of family and com- munities in poverty, making things and making do, endless days and apple pie, county fairs and rope swings over streams, pigtails and moonshine. It’s a fantasy, though not always a gingham picnic. Peo- ple die, suffer misfortune, turn to vice and wind up in jail. And yet such awful occur- rences are a fact of life in her imagined land, and she sings them matter-of-factly. “He’s gonna be there for the rest of his life / And all he ever did was shoot his wife,” Bobbie sighs on her version of Mose Alli- son’s Parchman Farm, as darkly as The Man In Black himself.
Bobbie’s best songs frequently use a similar device, painting acutely observed portraits of the characters in her fictional small towns through the familial language of kitchen table chat. Each story might well be preceded by a mother, sister or neighbour setting a plate for themselves and confiding, “You’ll never guess who I saw at the store today...” or, “Did you hear about what happened to...” It’s not a mil- lion miles from a David Lynchian world- view: behind every picket fence lies a scan- dal or a tragedy.
M
any of Bobbie’s song titles contain or are simply a person’s name: Willie, Benjamin, Beverly, Jeremi- ah, Belinda, Fancy. It’s a
trick that hooks your curiosity from the start like chapters in a book she’s about to read from. Tell us about Fancy, Bobbie! Who is Fancy?
Fancy is Gentry’s other masterpiece.
Written in the mould of those “I was born a poor child” songs, beloved of southern soul singers (the album was produced in Muscle Shoals by the legendary Rick Hall), Fancy is a masterclass in the novella as pop song. “Well I remember it all very well lookin’ back / It was the summer that I turned eighteen,” it begins. And we’re got.
And what about that song. Ode To
Billy Joe is one of the best short stories ever written. We arrive not as the event occurs but a year later. We learn about it through remembered gossip and hearsay and we never know the truth. Except, of course, we were never meant to. Ode To Billy Joe isn’t about Billy Joe McAllister at all. His suicide and whatever it was he threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge are what Hitchcock called MacGuffins; the cause of the event and even the event itself are merely devices. The song, as later explained by Gentry, is really about the vast gulf between the narrator and her mother, both failing to recognise the grief in the other. Like I said, it’s one of the best short stories ever written.
There are misses in this essential box too. While some of the cover versions are gorgeously Gentryfied (her husk is partic- ularly suited to Bacharach, and the previ- ously unreleased interpretations of the Spiral Starecase smash More Today Than Yesterday and Randy Newman’s sex- swapped Salome Smith And The Amazing Dancing Bear are worth the price alone), others feel like concessions to a record label wanting hits; few artists at the time escaped it. Despite teaming up with the supremely great Glen Campbell, their 1968 duo album rarely rises above bland- ly pleasant and relies on past hits to lift it from an MOR mire. But these lapses in inspiration were rare and Bobbie’s final
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