Why did Billy Joe jump off the Tallahatchie Bridge....

CallMeKate said:
o_O Was that to shock him out of doing it.... or do those hotlines
actually give "permission" like that?! This is troubling to me. Maybe
I'm not catching something... if he called a hotline, wouldn't he have
wanted to be HELPED?
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I let him talk for twenty minutes, I knew the name of his kids and how he got into that position. A few minutes later I began laughing ( yes, another thing we are not suppose to do when answering a call ) He said "I called you for help and you are laughing at me!" I said yes and I am sorry but come on, you just spent your check on that shotgun which pissed off your Mexican wife that out weighs you by a hundred pounds,,,That's funny to anyone! We ended well a few minutes later and he agreed the gun would be better for duck hunting and maybe his wife would forgive him if he brought home some meat. I doubted it would help but it got him through the night.
 

chic said:
Some question : What did the Tallahatchie bridge span? A river? A creek? Was it deep enough to accommodate suicide? Would a jump off it kill the jumper outright? Was Billie Joe suicidal before? How valid is preacher Brother Taylor's comment of seeing a girl like her and Billie Joe up on Choctaw ridge who appeared to be throwing something off the Tallahatchie bridge? Wouldn't this amount to unsubstantiated hearsay not admissible in court? So we really don't know anything for a fact except she spends a lot of time picking flowers on Choctaw ridge and throwing them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie bridge. Agreed? Anything else to add? :unsure:
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Well I have to say- it appears that all these years I got a bit mixed up over names(Bobby Gentry, Billie Joe, Billy Bob, etc) so that made a difference in interpreting the song. I always thought they were tossing an 'illegitimate' child off the bridge.... :unsure:
 
Sunny said:
Chic, I think if the body of water wasn't deep enough to accommodate suicide, there would be no point to the song. It would just be a sad dirge about some young guy jumping off a little bridge into the creek to go swimming. Clearly, there was much more meaning to his jumping off the bridge than that.

The part about the "nice young preacher" has always intrigued me. Was Mama doing a bit of matchmaking? The father obviously didn't approve of Billy Joe, the mother was a peacekeeper, so she was trying to derail the Billy Joe relationship by bringing together her daughter and the preacher.

And of course, there's the question: what did the preacher see being thrown into the water. The mystery of that question makes the whole song very haunting and intriguing.
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I agree with you. It must have been high enough for suicide. And her mother did seem partial to Brother Taylor. I wondered the same thing.
 
As Gentry told Fred Bronson, “The song is sort of a study in unconscious cruelty. But everybody seems more concerned with what was thrown off the bridge than they are with the thoughtlessness of the people expressed in the song. What was thrown off the bridge really isn’t that important.

“Everybody has a different guess about what was thrown off the bridge—flowers, a ring, even a baby. Anyone who hears the song can think what they want, but the real message of the song, if there must be a message, revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. They sit there eating their peas and apple pie and talking, without even realizing that Billie Joe’s girlfriend is sitting at the table, a member of the family.”


https://performingsongwriter.com/bobbie-gentry-ode-billie-joe/
 
Not answered in the song was. Did they ever recover the body? Was a suicide note left? Is the preacher a trouble maker by saying "something" was thrown off the bridge.
 
CallMeKate said:
o_O Was that to shock him out of doing it.... or do those hotlines
actually give "permission" like that?! This is troubling to me. Maybe
I'm not catching something... if he called a hotline, wouldn't he have
wanted to be HELPED?
Click to expand...
Not necessarily. People call hotlines for same reason they write suicide notes: Because they need to at least try to tell someone 'why'. Often they don't really feel seen/hear/cared about--they may rationally know there are people who love them but they suspect it that love would vanish if they revealed the depths of the depressive abyss they regularly fall into, climb out of and fall into again. They 'Mask' their true feelings to spare or protect Mom, Dad, friends, then feel even more 'invisible'--unheard, unseen for their 'real' self.

Psychologist Margaret Rutherford has labeled this 'perfectly hidden depression'. This Ted talk of hers on it is almost 16 minutes, but if you have an interest in the subject, or if you know anyone you've ever had even the slightest concern they were struggling mental health wise it is worth the watch.

 
C50 said:
Ah now that you mention that I think you're correct.
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It's been a long time, I thought maybe i wasn't remembering it right, so I checked this review of the movie by
Roger Ebert in 1976:

"But the moment comes, as I suppose it has to, when Billy Joe reveals his secret to Bobbie Lee and then jumps off the bridge (mercifully, we are not treated to a shot of the jump itself). His reason - that while drunk for the first time he has just had a homosexual relationship ("a sin before God and man") - would, I suppose, have been a compelling one for an uncertain adolescent, circa 1953. What's more, he then finds himself impotent with Bobbie Lee."

I can see reasons why Bobbie Gentry didn't like the movie, but I thought this seemed to fit the song and it was done with sensitivity, showing how much young gays used to suffer not that long ago.
 
Alligatorob said:
Because it was there...? Here is what Wikipedia says about it:

In August 1967, Gentry told the Los Angeles Times she wanted to show "people's lack of ability" to empathize with others' "tragedy." She pointed out the mother, who noticed but did not understand her daughter's lack of appetite, while later the daughter is unaware of the similarity of her mother's behavior after the father dies. Gentry explained that both characters had "isolated themselves in their own personal tragedies" and remained unconcerned for the others. The songwriter compared the end product to a play. On the object thrown off the Tallahatchie Bridge, she commented that the audience had found more meanings than she had intended. Gentry mentioned that theories of the time included a baby, a wedding ring and flowers. While she indicated that what happened at the bridge was the motivation behind Billie Joe's suicide, she also left it open to the listener's interpretation. Gentry said she had no answer and her sole motivation was to show "people's apathy".

In an interview with the Associated Press in November 1967, Gentry called the song "a study in unconscious cruelty." She also said that audiences were still asking her what was thrown off the bridge rather than noticing "the thoughtlessness of people expressed in the song," adding that what had been thrown was unimportant. She said people suggested to her it was a draft card, or a bottle of LSD pills. The songwriter clarified that she knew what it was, but said she considered it irrelevant to the story and deliberately left that interpretation open. Gentry remarked that the song's message revolved around the "nonchalant way" the family discussed the suicide. She also said that what was thrown off of the bridge was included because it established a relationship between Billie Joe and the daughter, providing "a possible motivation for his suicide the next day". The interview ended with Gentry's suggestion that it could have been a wedding ring.[23] Gentry told The New York Times in 1969: "I had my own idea what it was while I was writing it, but it's not that important. Actually it was something symbolic. But I've never told anyone what it was, not even my own dear mother."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ode_to_Billie_Joe_(song)
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Many years ago, before I read that, I was really disturbed about what they threw off the bridge. Surely not a baby, because we don't throw babies off bridges, we bury them and mark the graves, even if secretly. But, no, it was just a device to help the song along, and what a beautiful song it was!
 
Della said:
It's been a long time, I thought maybe i wasn't remembering it right, so I checked this review of the movie by
Roger Ebert in 1976:

"But the moment comes, as I suppose it has to, when Billy Joe reveals his secret to Bobbie Lee and then jumps off the bridge (mercifully, we are not treated to a shot of the jump itself). His reason - that while drunk for the first time he has just had a homosexual relationship ("a sin before God and man") - would, I suppose, have been a compelling one for an uncertain adolescent, circa 1953. What's more, he then finds himself impotent with Bobbie Lee."

I can see reasons why Bobbie Gentry didn't like the movie, but I thought this seemed to fit the song and it was done with sensitivity, showing how much young gays used to suffer not that long ago.
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gruntlabor said:
Many years ago, before I read that, I was really disturbed about what they threw off the bridge. Surely not a baby, because we don't throw babies off bridges, we bury them and mark the graves, even if secretly. But, no, it was just a device to help the song along, and what a beautiful song it was!
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I think throwing something off the bridge was too big a part of the song to just be a device. It seems to me that the answer to why he jumped is based on what they threw. I don't think we should just throw that part out to make it fit a s-e-xual agenda.

How old do I have to be to say s-e-x here?
 
Pepper said:
Small town Southern preachers are always troublemakers. Aren't they?
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They almost always are in the movies, that's for sure. Some people probably think all their sermons are either about how God hates gays or the evils of rock and roll. I've moved 15 times in my life which means 15 -20 different churches, in two countries and four states and never heard any of that, but the Hollywood screen writers would probably have found them all dull.
 
Jondalar7 said:
I let him talk for twenty minutes, I knew the name of his kids and how he got into that position. A few minutes later I began laughing ( yes, another thing we are not suppose to do when answering a call ) He said "I called you for help and you are laughing at me!" I said yes and I am sorry but come on, you just spent your check on that shotgun which pissed off your Mexican wife that out weighs you by a hundred pounds,,,That's funny to anyone! We ended well a few minutes later and he agreed the gun would be better for duck hunting and maybe his wife would forgive him if he brought home some meat. I doubted it would help but it got him through the night.
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Thank you for giving us the 'rest of the story'. While i never volunteered at a hotline (but did once call one) i have probably kept at least half a dozen people alive for a little longer thru conversations (usually in wee hours of morning), physically got one to a hospital. Judy Garland's friends like Mel Torme called it being 'Dawn Patrol', sometimes i didn't know the person but a mutual friend did and put them on the phone with me or took me to them.
i understand why they train volunteers as they do, but i also know from experience on both sides of it that sometimes the thing that gets thru is emotional honesty and showing you really hear/see them, even as you acknowledge that you may not fully understand what they are feeling.

What you said in your post about asking him to not do it where his kids could find him hit home with me. One thing that often pulled me back from it was considering the mess i'd leave for someone else to clean up. After my NDE it wasn't an option and once i had kids that totally barricaded that door. But my 2nd husband's father had done it in their home when the kids were teens. He was a Vietnam vet who had MH issues to begin and PTSD made worse. 2nd hubby and his younger sister (who was my friend before i got involved with her brother, found the body. But even the older sister and youngest brother were profoundly messed up by it. Actually the younger sister dealt with it best. (\She and i still talk on FB almost 30 yrs since we moved away.
 
Myrtle said:
I think throwing something off the bridge was too big a part of the song to just be a device. It seems to me that the answer to why he jumped is based on what they threw. I don't think we should just throw that part out to make it fit a s-e-xual agenda.

How old do I have to be to say s-e-x here?
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Well, it's what Gentry said. I remember her saying that she didn't know why he jumped, that the song was "a study in unconscious cruelty." It was about nobody caring.
sex sex sex
 
Pepper said:
Small town Southern preachers are always troublemakers. Aren't they?

I have a secret about the movie.
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While Della has a point that most are boring, there's different kinds of 'trouble-making'. Both Baptist and Methodist minister in Ruskin, FL in early 1950s made what the late John Lewis called 'good trouble'. The Baptist church got a Cross burned on it's front lawn.
 
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