Bobbie Gentry: the elusive star, her forgotten gem and its rediscovery

Despite her current reputation as a recluse, Bobbie Gentry was not a reluctant star when she started out. “I always planned to be a success,” she told a US newspaper in 1968. The good aspects of fame outweighed the bad. “But,” she added with a sigh, “I do miss the solitude.”

The Mississippi-born singer-songwriter was speaking after the release of her second album, The Delta Sweete. The previous year her hit single “Ode to Billie Joe” had knocked The Beatles from number one in the US charts, and her debut album proceeded to knock them off the top of the album charts too. But The Delta Sweete, a baroque country-pop song suite themed around her Southern upbringing, flopped. It reached 132 in the charts.

Just over 50 years later, Gentry’s unjustly neglected concept album has been reborn, revived by US indie rock duo Mercury Rev. Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited is a sumptuous exercise in psychedelic music, with guest vocalists including Lucinda Williams, Beth Orton, Phoebe Bridgers and Melissa Nadler. Drifting by like the Delta rivers that often turn up in Gentry’s lyrics, these new versions of her songs have a dreamlike, symphonic quality, at once hazy and grand.

The heavy-lidded atmosphere is apt. Gentry retired from the stage in 1981 without explanation and has not uttered a word in public since. Now 76 and living in an unknown location, she has become something of a fantasy figure herself. A cult has grown up around her as a strong-willed, highly talented musician who chafed against the limitations of a male-dominated industry. Yet her vanishing act has also turned her into a phantom.

Mercury Rev’s frontman Jonathan Donahue recalls being amazed by “Ode to Billie Joe” as a young boy in upstate New York in the early 1970s when the song was a radio staple. “I don’t think it has ever left me,” he says. “Looking back, I can see that those little string flourishes in ‘Ode to Billie Joe’, if I’m honest they’re in [Mercury Rev’s best-known album] Deserters’ Songs too.”

It was not until about eight years ago that he came across The Delta Sweete. “I just kept playing it and thinking ‘What a gem of an album’. It feels like an island that someone left off a map. It was always flourishing and is still vibrantly alive. It’s just that people didn’t know to sail over there to see it.”

Lucinda Williams is one of the few who did. The US singer-songwriter was among the doughty band of Gentry fans who propelled The Delta Sweete to its lowly chart position in 1968. She turns up on the new album singing “Ode to Billie Joe” which, although not on the original, is included as an extra track.

Williams was a teenager in New Orleans when the song topped the charts in 1967. She remembers marvelling at Gentry’s low, smoky, Southern voice, a world away from the higher-pitched, prettier-sounding singers she had been listening to until then.

“I thought, wow,” Williams says. “Here was a woman who was really sexy and tough at the same time, who played guitar and wrote her own songs. That was just unheard of, especially in the country music world. The only other woman who did that was Loretta Lynn, but she didn’t play guitar. At the time there hadn’t been anybody else like Bobbie Gentry. She made a phenomenal impact on me.”

Gentry crammed seven albums into her short recording career, which ended in 1971 with Patchwork. Mingling elements of raw roots-rock and ornate orchestral-pop, her sound was hard to classify. Writing in The New York Times in 1968, the critic Robert Shelton settled on “swamp music”. “It was different,” Williams says. “It wasn’t folk music, it wasn’t country music. Now I would call it country soul.”

The topography of Gentry’s songs revolved around the south. Although she left Mississippi at the age of 13 to live in California, she was nicknamed the “Cajun Queen” and the “Delta Queen”. She attended UCLA, studying philosophy, and the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. “I think of myself essentially as a writer — this is my first love and interest,” she told a Mississippi newspaper in 1968. “My songs are actually poetry set to music.”

“Ode to Billie Joe” began life as an unpublished short story, and became a Hollywood film in 1976. It is famous for its Southern Gothic tale of suicide and romantic transgression, hinging on a mysterious package thrown from a bridge. Although this four-minute-long hit came to overshadow the rest of Gentry’s work, the same gifts for scene-setting, characterisation, perspective, suspense and lyricism are on display throughout all her albums.

“I’m just a total fan,” says Beth Orton, who sings the song “Courtyard”. “I love the tone of her voice, I love the words, I love the way her music makes me feel. Her storytelling is extraordinary. Nowadays everything is handed to us on a plate, nuance is not something that people deal with. She definitely deals with nuance.”

Phoebe Bridgers grew up listening to Delta Sweete because her mother is a Gentry enthusiast. She sings “Jessye’ Lisabeth”, a tender Western lullaby in which a woman tries to shush a crying child back to sleep. “It’s like a mystery song, you don’t know what happens,” she says. “It seems very sweet but when you think about it more, it’s like, what sinister thing has happened?”

Gentry mainly sang about women, but in her professional life she had to contend with men: demanding record label bosses, surly session or touring musicians, producers and writers who claimed credit for her work, and, in the case of “Ode to Billie Joe”, pursued those claims in court.

What a gem of an album. It feels like an island that someone left off a map . . . It’s just that people didn’t know to sail over there to see it

She wrote and arranged most of her music, but it was not until her final album, 1971’s Patchwork — which she thought her finest achievement — that she received a production credit. “So I’m packin’ up and I’m checkin’ out,” she sang on its last track. She continued performing live — including splashy Las Vegas shows, hardly suggestive of a reclusive personality — before abruptly stopping in 1981.

“I guess she had enough of the business,” says Marissa Nadler, who performs “Refractions”. “Well, that’s not too hard to dissect. Back then it was even harder for a woman in the music industry and a writer than it is now. Even now it’s tempting to cut and run. It’s like that Joni Mitchell lyric: “I’m going to make a lot of money/Then I’m going to quit this crazy scene.’ Maybe that’s what she did.”

“I always thought it was a real shame,” Williams says. “I don’t believe that you create art like that or music that’s so great and then all of a sudden you just quit. Something else happens in your life that makes you do that. Because the drive to do it is so strong.”

Accounts of Gentry since the 1980s are shadowy but point to a normal life lived outside the public eye rather than a hermit-like withdrawal into seclusion — more Harper Lee than JD Salinger.

“She sounds like a very sane woman,” Orton says. She initially felt tantalised by the idea of Gentry listening to the new version of The Delta Sweete. “At first I thought, oh maybe this will bring her out. But then I was like, maybe she doesn’t want to be brought out, leave her alone! Her body of work is enough — it’s perfect really.”

‘Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete Revisited’ is out on February 8 on Bella Union

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