Every year, the third of June sneaks up on me. I’m aware of the date, of course, but it typically doesn’t occur to me until midday that June 3 is not just June 3, but “the third of June,” unofficial Billie Joe McAllister day. In Bobbie Gentry’s 1967 hit single Ode to Billie Joe, the first line is “It was the third of June / Another sleepy, dusty Delta day.”
For readers unfamiliar with the song, it’s set in rural Mississippi and tells a cryptic tale of death and indifference to suffering. Gentry described the storyline as a “study in unconscious cruelty.” The music itself, with sparse but dramatic instrumentation, seems to match the enigmatic narrative, told by Gentry in the first person. The setting and the characters are straight out of Southern Gothic central casting: An authoritarian father, a patiently suffering mother, the local religious busybodies, troubled teenagers.
The song topped the Billboard singles chart toward the end of summer ’67, earned Gentry two Grammy awards, and stuck around in the nation’s consciousness long enough to inspire a 1976 movie. It was added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry in 2023. Gentry retired from public life after about a decade in the music business. In mildly unexpected turn, it looks like Gentry’s 1970 song Fancy might have a longer pop-culture shelf life than Ode to Billie Joe, thanks to Reba McEntire’s instant-classic cover version in 1990.
As for the third of June, the story from in Ode to Billie Joe has been examined at length over the past half-century or so. What can we learn from the tale now?
Our current discourse, fueled by recent events, often refers to notions of cruelty, indifference, and empathy. It’s easy enough to see evidence of these in the public sphere. And being that these words here appear on a public radio station’s website, readers of this space, of course, are likely to defend empathy as a practice against those who would mock it.
But before we see ourselves in the character of Gentry’s narrator, and before we see those we don’t like in the person of the story’s cruel father, it might be worth stopping a moment. How many times have we rationalized our own indifference to the suffering of those we don’t like based on the idea that justice is being served, and that those of whom we disapprove deserve to suffer? In so doing, have we not become exactly like the father in the song?
“Billie Joe never had a lick of sense / Pass the biscuits, please.”
Maybe we’ve all been in each one of those seats described at that Mississippi dinner table. The victim, the perpetrator, the enabler, the bystander. If someone were to ask us which one we’re sitting in right now, what would the answer be?
