Robin Hamilton wrote:

>
>What did me and Billy Joe throw off the bridge? Well, obviously ...
>
>
I remember the impact when that song first out in 1966. Gentry was born
in July 1944, which makes her just five months my junior; so she was 22
when that song hit. And did it ever. Everyone guessed "fetus" right
away regarding what the narrator and Billy Joe chucked over the bridge.
It's probably the right answer, yet when it's so easy to guess, you
start second-guessing yourself. A bag of Faberge eggs? Secret texts
stolen from the Vatican Library's pornography collection? Now the song
and it's mystery have faded into the great country of Who Cares, but
then...well, I guess Gentry could have lived on the royalties if she'd
invested carefully.

>Bobby Gentry has to be about the only singer who stopped dead at the height
>of her career and went totally underground, deep running. She switched from
>singing to producing, which had a longer shelf-life, in the same way that
>Bunny Yeager moved from in front of to behind the camera.
>
>Not so many can time it was well as did those two ladies.
>
>
I can't account for it. This is a lousy comparison, but my first
thought was Orson Welles. Lousy because Gentry wrote a very good song
(it really is, read the lyrics), and Welles did masterpieces. He also
had more success--even minor--with later films than Gentry had with her
later songs (name 3). I guess the idea I had was of artists peaking
early and never quite living up to the early promise...and even there,
Welles was the victim of the studios as much as of his ego. "We will
sell no whine before its time."

>Is she still alive? Bobby Gentry that is, not Bunny Yeager.
>
>
As far as I know she is. "Googling" her name brings up some really bad
websites, obviously done by fans who were not seriously into music but
into Sixties nostalgia. She never seemed to acquire (or earn) the cult
of someone like Laura Nyro (nor did she have Nyro's gifts) so the
websites are not reverential or informative but simply trashy. All I
can gather is that she was and is entirely out of music and trying to
work in TV production.

Ken <Workin' for a while on a fishin' boat right outside of Delacroix>
-----------------------------

Kenneth Wolman www.kenwolman.com kenwolman.blogspot.com

"A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank balance was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove...but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."