Flowers for Billy Joe It was an ordinary, sleepy, dusty day in June in the Delta.
There was a song in the beginning. The strange, exciting imagination of the South Gothic country-rock ballad “Ode of Billy Joe”, performed for the first time in late July 1967, instantly soared to the top position of the charts, and the self-titled debut album of Bobby Gentry, author and performer, made a sensation, ousting Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from the first place. Slightly hoarse, warmed by the hot southern sun, the voice of the singer, sounding to the uncomplicated chords of acoustic guitar and bizarrely flowing sounds of violins, only described a family conversation at the dinner table on the day when Billy Joe McAllister, a teenager from a nearby village, rushed into the river from a bridge with a sonorous name Tallahatchi. But behind the mundane lines lurked a disturbing understatement, perhaps a mystery that, left unsolved, intrigued listeners on both sides of the Atlantic. In August 1967, in offices, smokers, parties and radio stations, they asked the same question: "What did Billy Joe McAllister and his girlfriend drop into the river from the Tallahatchi Bridge, and why did he kill himself?" Bobby Gentry said in an interview that she didn't know the answers, and that it didn't matter. What matters is the indifference with which God-fearing people relate to the news of death that happened very near, and how alienated even the closest relatives who cannot comfort each other in similar grief are. In France, England, Sweden and the Netherlands, Oda Billy Joe's translation songs have appeared, recounting in different languages the sad story of broken love and a life that ended early and ridiculously, which is glimpsed at lunch between requests for scones or an apple pie.
The song's continued popularity led to its film adaptation, which promised to reveal the mystery of what happened on the Tallahatchi Bridge on June 3, 1953, on "an ordinary sleepy, dusty June day in the Delta." She became the film of the same name, staged according to the script, in which Bobby Gentry participated. It was filmed in her native Mississippi, near the village where she grew up on her grandparents' farm, in an old house without electricity or running water. Thanks to her vision and memory, the picture faithfully recreates the early 1950s in the deep rural South, where time seems to flow by special laws, slower than in the whole country. Where rural landscapes keep peace and undisturbed beauty, and the locals speak loudly with a viscous accent, thick as molasses.
Against this idyllic backdrop, the story of 18-year-old Billy Joe McAlister (Robby Benson) and 15-year-old Bobby Lee Hartley (Glynnis O'Connor) unfolds. The nameless and silent narrator from the song acquired in the film a name, voice, personality and strength of character, infrequent in such a young girl. Both young actors, who were not even 20, touchingly played the tenderness and shy fervor of the birth of first love. But by promising to reveal the secret of the song, the authors had to fulfill it, and the path they chose did not include the idyll of contemporary Romeo and Juliet. She is crumbling under the weight of Billy Joe’s turmoil, shaken by the discovery of dark pools in himself, the depths of which he did not suspect, desires that he did not understand, could not explain otherwise than shameful sin before God and people. If in the bucolic outback of Mississippi, a state included in the Bible Belt, the quite natural longing of young bodies and the desire for sensual joys were considered as devilish temptations of weak flesh, then the winding labyrinths of sexual orientation, in which a naive inexperienced teenager who grew up in submission to strict ethical norms and laws of the local community, inevitably led to tragedy.
Avoiding stereotypes in depicting the despair and hopelessness of Billy Joe’s situation, the authors endowed his image with depth, sympathy and humanity, thanks to which the story of awakening feelings and shattered hopes reached the hearts of many viewers. As a promise to reveal the long-standing mystery of the song, its adaptation has equally supporters and detractors who disagree with the decision of the writers. Indeed, where the song only hints at the causes of the tragedy, giving space to the imagination, the film suggests accepting its version of events as the final one. The main problem of the film adaptation is that the screen failed to recreate the deceptive simplicity of the ballad, hiding, like the tip of the iceberg, alienation, loneliness and unspoken despair. Should the creators be blamed for this? One film would hardly have been able to reveal the concentration of human passions, subtexts, inconsistencies, secrets, sorrows, losses, demanded in a 4-minute goodbye to unfulfilled love. They would be more than enough for the multi-volume saga of the new Yoknapathoth.
And I often collect flowers at Choctaw Ridge and throw them into the muddy waters from the Tallahatchi Bridge.