Though her birth name was Roberta Lee Streeter, she was known around the world as Bobbie Gentry. Born in Chickasaw County, Mississippi, and raised in the town of Greenwood, Gentry is most known for her career-defining 1967 hit, “Ode to Billy Joe,” and as the writer and original singer of “Fancy” that was later made a hit by Reba McEntire. The mysterious tale of “Ode to Billy Joe,” written solely by Gentry, made her a buzz-worthy artist in the late 1960s, with a stage name as classic as her songs.
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Meaning Behind the Stage Name
While she spent her youth in Mississippi, Gentry moved to Palm Springs, California, as a teenager to live with her mother where she adopted the now-famous moniker. Before she was a famous solo singer, Gentry was in a duo with her mother Ruby, known as Ruby and Bobbie Meyers.
The hit country singer eventually changed her name to Bobbie Gentry, inspired by the titular character of the 1952 film, Ruby Gentry. Portrayed by Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Jones, the character Ruby Gentry was also a woman raised in the rural South. The film revolved around her rags-to-riches story. The hit singer combined “Gentry” with her childhood nickname, “Bobbie,” according to the book Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music.
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Gentry incorporated her native state and backwoods life into “Ode to Billie Joe.” The mysterious story about a boy named Billy Joe who was seen throwing an unidentified object over the Tallahatchie Bridge with the narrator before jumping off the bridge himself, still creates intrigue for listeners more than 50 years after its release. The song almost serves as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as Gentry shared in a rare interview in 1968 that the song’s legacy would determine what genre it lives in.
“A lot of people have tried to classify my music as being folk music…I don’t really have a classification myself, but for that particular song ‘Ode to Billy Joe’ there have been lots of comments that perhaps it will last a long time,” she said. “But my feeling about folk songs is you don’t write a folk song, a song becomes a folk song if it is absorbed into the culture of a particular region if it has any longevity to it. So maybe we’ll see in 40 or 50 years if people are still singing ‘Ode to Billy Joe’ then it would be considered a folk song. I would love it.”
Since retiring from the music industry in the early 1980s, Gentry has mysteriously disappeared from the public eye, with only a few close friends knowing her whereabouts.
(Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
