Today, June 3, we celebrate Bobbie Gentry and her ur-folk ballad "Ode to Billie Joe." If Wikipedia knows anything, she is 82, long retired, and lives in Los Angeles. I wish her well.
If the song tells us anything, it is how tragedy is embedded in everyday life and how we mostly let it slide off our backs in the service of survival. Those who can't shrug it off end up mired in depression.
Gentry never did say what was thrown off the Tallahatchie bridge, her concern was the unconscious cruelty experienced by Billie Joe's girlfriend elegist.
