JACKSON, Miss. — If I haven’t responded to your email following the “What happened to singer Bobbie Gentry?” column on June 1, consider this a personal apology and a “thank you” for each one. I have ...

Music fans know the importance of Friday. “It was the 3rd of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day.” That is the opening line of one of music’s most discussed, examined and appreciated songs — “Ode to ...

Today, Bobbie Gentry is often talked about because of her mysterious disappearance from country music. In late April 1982, at the height of her music career, the star abruptly stepped away from the ...

It was the song no one could escape in summer 1967 — and one that has haunted us ever since as one of pop music’s most beguiling hits. “Ode to Billie Joe,” Bobbie Gentry’s baroque-folk tale about a ...

Bobbie Gentry is one of the great legends of 1960s popular music, an artist who debuted with an enigmatic, enduring smash hit who then cultivated an idiosyncratic country-pop crossover sound for a few ...

It was not the third of June, nor was it another sleepy, dusty, Delta day. It was on another muggy July evening in St. Tammany Parish when my buddies and I first heard Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie ...

In 1967, the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love” was knocked out of the No.1 spot on the charts by a slow, plaintive ballad by the unknown singer-songwriter Bobbie Gentry. “Ode to Billie Joe” was Gentry’s ...

In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Something funny ...

In July of 1967, Capitol Records released “Ode to Billie Joe,” a spooky wisp of a song by an unknown artist named Bobbie Gentry. Industry wisdom said “Ode” was too dark, too long, too different to get ...

June 3 is unofficially Bobbie Gentry Day, as that's the day the singer's most famous character jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge in the smash hit "Ode to Billie Joe." Fifteen years later, Gentry ...

Fifty years ago, on a week when “All You Need Is Love” by the Beatles topped the Billboard charts, a song came out of nowhere—from a singer no one had heard of—and took over the No. 1 spot. “Ode to ...