The Year In Music: 3rd June

Ode To Billie Joe, Bobbie Gentry (1967)

Nearly midsummer. Hot the morning after half-term ends. A heated first day back at the home office, on top of all the others. But the year in music can’t fade slowly into the cassette fuzz. And this Substack was set up thanks to a few specific songs. This is one of them.

Fifty-seven years ago, in the long, hot summer of love, a shiver of unease arrived in the heat haze. This mood, this feeling, was created by a few sparsely arranged instruments: a fingerpicked guitar, sultry and fevered, and a tremor of violins and cellos. The latter suggested the comfort, the warmth of ultraviolet rays before they delivered their subsequent, sinister aftershocks.

This is how the Southern storytelling of Bobbie Gentry arrived in the ears of the American public in July 1967, when her first single, Ode To Billie Joe, was released. The final track on her debut album, it became a US no 1, knocking The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love off the top of the charts. Over that summer, it travelled across the Atlantic like the Gulf Stream, arriving in the UK mid-autumn like a blast of humidity.