Ode To Billy Joe

Ode To Billy Joe (Herman Raucher) is my all time favourite book. I havent read it in years (I'll be digging it out soon) but I still remember how it made me feel. The characters were so real it was like the dialogue was running through your head in words rather than in print. It was such an awesome take on the song by Bobbie Gentry. Listening to Sinead O'Conner's Version feeling me with rage. She just fuels all of those idiots with their interpretation that billy Joe and the narrator threw a baby off the bridge by putting the baby cry in the pinacle of the song. I shudder thinking about it. She completely kills the real meaning behind it (as Gentry herself says, "The message of the song revolves around the nonchalant way the family talks about the suicide. The song is a study in unconscious cruelty.") I believe it is best laid out in the book where Billy Joe and narrator fumble over narrators ragdoll Benjamin at the bridge. The doll falls off by Billy Joe's hand thus symbolizing the end of the narrator's innocence. If in truth they were throwing a baby (stillborn, alive or aborted) then would not her innocence have been taken before that? And then the whole story losing its point. Suddenly it is not their attitudes to suicide in the forefront of the song but rather what they threw off and were hiding.

See for yourself (If i can embed this... freaking technology...)