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LP, the conceptual Patchwork, is cut from the same beautiful cloth as her debut.
When a singer has one truly colossal hit, the selective nature of history causes it to overshadow the rest of their work. And sometimes that’s fair. Some artists only fly to the moon once in their career. But in this case it’s an injustice. Bobbie Gentry deserves to be remembered as one of the all-time greats. Her talent was stratospheric.
The Girl From Chickasaw County – The Complete Capitol Masters is the result of several years’ toil by Andrew Batt, previously responsible for bringing us various Fairport Convention, Fotheringay and Sandy Denny retrospec- tives. I spoke to Andrew about the pro- cess of doing what no one had done before, and what makes Bobbie Gentry so uniquely fascinating to music obses- sives like us. But first, the question we all want to know the answer to: has he… spoken to her?
“Bobbie knows about the box set and was happy for it to go ahead. I reached out to her at the start of the project to see if she would like to contribute, but she is happy in retirement and didn’t want to be involved.”
The collection is called The Complete Capitol Masters but did you find every- thing you wanted? Was anything missing?
“The Capitol Archive in LA retained her master tapes, so helpfully they were all in one place. Although one thing that was disappointing is that Capitol kept no record at all of the musicians that played on Bobbie’s recordings.”
“There has been much talk over the years that a longer, seven-minute version of Ode To Billie Joe was recorded, and that this was edited down to a more manage- able four minutes. Bobbie’s original lyric sheet (which we included in the box) seems to bear this out as it contains two additional verses not featured in the final track. The released recording of Ode To Billie Joe was in fact Bobbie’s demo, which she had recorded privately before signing her record deal. If a seven-minute version ever existed, it had already been trimmed to four minutes by the time Capitol pur- chased the recording.”
We know so little about her life; where do you think Bobbie’s musical abili- ties came from?
“She exhibited an aptitude for music from an early age and, encouraged by her grandmother, started teaching herself how to play the piano by listening to music on an old wireless. Bobbie composed her first song, called My Dog Sergeant, aged seven. Years later she would cheerfully perform the track on her 1968 BBC TV series and it’s included on the box set.”
“In the early ’60s, when she was a teenager living with her mother in Palm Springs, they performed locally as a duo. So it seems likely that she inherited some musical ability from her mother. Around the mid-’60s Bobbie began writing in earnest, mainly songs, but she was also writing short stories. In fact she told After Dark magazine that both OdeTo Billie Joe and Fancy began life as stories.”
Live at the BBC, 1968
To Billie Joe was one of her first composi- tions and it resonated across her whole career, as Who Knows Where The Time Goes and Wuthering Heights would do for Sandy and Kate.”
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Why do you think she’s so private and ended her music career so definitively?
“Any response as to why Bobbie walked away from her public career can only be speculative, but my take on it is that when Capitol entered financial diffi- culties and the entire management team was sacked at the time of her final album she found herself friendless at the label. When her contract came up for negotia- tion the following year there was no one there to fight her corner and it left her basically unable to record, which must have been devastating for someone that had been so prolific and seemed such a natural songwriter.”
“Following this I think she threw her- self into her live work partly because in that area she couldn’t be controlled, as she owned her own production company. And it gave her the opportunity to clean up financially, meaning that by the end of the
ike Sandy Denny or Kate Bush, Bobbie seemed to possesses an aptitude from a very young age that defies analysis. Ode
1970s she was able to comfortably retire on her earnings and the continuing royal- ties from her back catalogue. I also think when she had her son in 1979, performing for six months of the year wouldn’t have been practical. Bobbie had been brought up by her paternal grandparents following her parents’ divorce, and I think she want- ed to give her son a different type of child- hood to her own.”
“Bobbie’s self-imposed exile appears really enigmatic to us in this age of second acts, revived careers, and the scramble to regain and hold onto celebrity, but per- haps it’s not really her disappearance that intrigues us so much as her never coming back. We struggle to understand why someone wouldn’t want to be famous, or at least return to bask in their former glo- ries. But Bobbie was never in it for the fame; she wasn’t the kind of star that needed to be validated. After Bobbie retired from public life, I think she carried on working behind the scenes as she still had her production company which had been involved in TV and film develop- ment, and her two music publishing com- panies. So her disappearance isn’t the story of someone who gave it all up to go and live on a farm, it’s the story of some- one who carried on working but no longer wanted to be a public personality.”
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