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Is there any reference in the song to suggest that the story behind it takes place in 1953? Songwriter Bobbie Gentry would have been ten years old at the time, and probably not romantically interested in boys in same the way the main character in the ballad is (apparently) interested in Billy Joe. The actress who played Bobbie Lee in the movie, Glynnis O'Connor, was nineteen at the time. The song furthermore says nothing about her leaving home after Billy Joe's death.
As far as I can determine, the date originated in Herman Raucher's screenplay. Raucher had also written Summer of '42 a few years before Ode to Billy Joe. His novelization of Bobbie Gentry's 1967 ballad was published in March 1976, during the height of the 1950s nostalgia craze in the United States. The movie was released nationwide the following June. Except for its reference to a "picture show," the song has a 1960s sensibility about it. It's more mature than the Everly Brothers' "Wake Up, Little Susie" (1957) or J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers' "Last Kiss" (1964), for instance. Its narrator keeps her feelings to herself, and is still mourning her lost love a year after his death.
I was only a child myself when the single was released in the summer of 1967, but I always imagined Billy Joe to be appreciably older than the balladeer -- and consequently that he committed suicide because he feared he'd crossed an age barrier with her, not because he had been seduced by a gay man.
--Varazslo 20:55, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
- This article is about the movie, and in the movie he clearly commits suicide because of having gay sex with another man. Rent the movie and watch it yourself, if you like. In the movie, Billy Joe is about the same age as the girl. — Frecklefoot | Talk 00:35, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Bridge Renaming
Unfortunately, I don't have a means of providing a verifiable source on this, but I do recall clearly an AP article that came out sometime between 1978 and 1982 concerning Mississippi renaming a bridge to be the "Tallahatchie Bridge". The bridge in question was the one used in filming. It was a gala event with the governor, Bobbie Gentry, and various other entertainment folks in attendance... and one uninvited and unwanted dissident, a woman in her late seventies or early eighties who strenuously objected to the proceedings. The bridge was the Reynolds Bridge, she said, and it was named for her grandfather Reynolds who had designed it. Renaming it dishonored his memory. The woman was escorted away and the scheduled photo ops went on. Of all the songs, movies, etc., that was the saddest story to come out of the whole thing, IMO. --Wesley R. Elsberry (talk) 02:49, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
