Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Glenn Gould, Leonard Bernstein, and the New York Philharmonic perform the first movement of Bach’s D Minor Keyboard Concerto, preceded by a talk by Bernstein about the piece and interpretation. This performance, Gould’s U.S. television debut, was originally broadcast by CBS on January 31, 1960, as part of “The Creative Performer,” an episode of Ford Presents:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.”
Randall Jarrell, “Reflections on Wallace Stevens”
Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” turns fifty years old next month, and we’re still listening to it—and talking about it. I was eleven years old when Gentry’s most famous record was released, and I have the strongest possible memories of the haunting impression that it made on me. I couldn’t hear it often enough. I still find it haunting a half-century later, albeit for somewhat different reasons.
Like everyone else who first heard “Ode to Billie Joe” on the radio when it was new, I was fascinated by its “puzzle” aspect. What was it that Billie Joe McAllister and the unnamed first-person narrator—presumably Gentry herself—threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and why did Billie Joe throw himself off the bridge shortly thereafter? (For what it’s worth, most of the people whom I knew back then took it for granted that the song had something to do with an unwanted pregnancy, an interpretation that I continue to find plausible.) Suicide was an utterly alien notion to me in those days, thus making the song all the more intriguing. In addition, “Ode to Billie Joe” is, like Rupert Holmes’ “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” and Louis Jordan’s “Saturday Night Fish Fry,” a song that tells a story, a genre that rarely hits big but is always irresistible on the rare occasions when it does so.
For me, though, there was far more to the appeal of “Ode to Billie Joe” than its enigmatic story. To begin with, Gentry’s sultry mezzo voice was sexy, a quality that I had only just begun to appreciate, however vaguely, in 1967. It was also tinged with the rich, loamy colors of the blues, a music that would soon become infinitely important to me but of which I then knew nothing. Her singing was a glimpse of my future, the evidence of things unheard.
And now? I strolled into our living room the other night as Mrs. T was watching Rosanne Cash sing “Ode to Billie Joe” on TV, and found myself swept up anew into its mystery. This time, though, what struck me most forcibly was how redolent the song is of the lost world of my childhood.
To be sure, I didn’t grow up in Mississippi, but Smalltown, U.S.A., positioned as it is on the edge of the Deep South, was and is a place where people live and speak very differently than they do up north. Even when it’s sung by someone who doesn’t have the kind of southern accent that always fills me with intense nostalgia—and Rosanne Cash’s faded childhood accent reasserts itself whenever she sings the song—the lyrics are full of phrases that waft me back to the place where I was born: Child, what’s happened to your appetite? I’ve been cookin’ all morning and you haven’t touched a single bite….Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense. Pass the biscuits, please….Mama hollered out the back door, “Y’all remember to wipe your feet.” The only other song I know that has that effect on me is Lucinda Williams’ Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, which reminds me no less powerfully of Sunday-afternoon visits to the invisibly tiny Missouri town where my mother grew up and her mother lived.
I’ve never met Bobbie Gentry, and never expect to. She withdrew from the world long ago, undoubtedly disillusioned by the realities of her brief taste of fame. But if I were ever to do so, I know what I’d do: I’d thank her for “Ode to Billie Joe,” a message in a musical bottle that will always remind me of what it felt like to be an eleven-year-old boy, peering across the ocean that separates childhood from the unimaginable future of maturity.
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Bobbie Gentry sings “Ode to Billie Joe” on the BBC in 1968. The string arrangement, also heard on the original recording, is by Jimmie Haskell:
Rosanne Cash and John Leventhal perform “Ode to Billie Joe” at MASS MoCA’s 2016 “FreshGrass” festival:
In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, which appears in the online edition of today’s paper, I comment on a controversy that has the American theater community up in arms. (No, not that one!) Here’s an excerpt.
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Edward Albee spent most of his long life stirring up theatrical trouble, and he continues to do so eight months after his death. Just last month, the Shoebox Theatre, a small house in Portland, Oregon, was denied performance rights to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Michael Streeter, the producer, wanted to cast a black actor as Nick, one of the play’s four characters. This went squarely against the script, in which Nick is described as “blond.” (Another character broadly hints that he looks like a Nazi.) In addition, Mr. Albee reportedly said that since the play is set in the early ’60s, a time when mixed-race marriages were uncommon, it was neither logical nor appropriate to cast actors of different races as Nick and Honey, his wife. Result: No show….
What is now known as “non-traditional” casting…is both commonplace and generally (if not universally) thought to be a good thing. Not only does the Public Theater’s new Shakespeare in the Park version of “Julius Caesar” feature a woman, Elizabeth Marvel, in the part of Marc Antony, but another New York-based troupe, Pocket Universe, has just opened an all-female production of the same play. Not surprisingly, then, Mr. Albee’s refusal to countenance similar casting of his plays has been widely and passionately criticized as fuddy-duddy at best, crypto-racist at worst….
I’m interested, being a sometime playwright, in ensuring that the rights of any living author to control his own work are fully protected under the law. That is—or should be—a given. But I also agree with the film critic Mark Harris, who broke the “Virginia Woolf” story on Twitter and who has argued in an online essay that “death is, I’d argue, the point at which this aspect of copyright law should cede to a greater social and artistic good….It’s hard to imagine a playwright’s work long surviving him if it’s shackled to the unexamined enforcement of questionable decisions from another era, or constrained by the terror that it might be mishandled.”
No small part of the burgeoning vitality of modern-day Shakespeare productions, after all, lies in the freshness and immediacy that can be fostered by genuinely imaginative non-traditional casting (as opposed to the rigidly political kind). By far the best “Julius Caesar” I’ve ever reviewed, directed by Amanda Dehnert at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2011, was a modern-dress production that featured a woman actor, Vilma Silva, in the title role. And while “Virginia Woolf” still feels fresh and immediate, a time will come—perhaps soon, maybe even now—when it will profit from an equally new spin….
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Read the whole thing here.
The trailer for Mike Nichols’ 1966 film version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
From 2007:
Name your area of expertise/interest. That’s a tough one. Some would argue that I have no area of expertise! On reflection, though, I’d have to say that it’s criticism in general (though there was a time when I would have said music)….
Read the whole thing here.
“The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.”
Randall Jarrell, “The Taste of the Age”
Jesse Owens is the guest on This Is Your Life. The host is Ralph Edwards. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on April 27, 1960:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I’ll tell you a minor secret of playing villains. Mine are usually polite and almost invariably charming. Nobody likes a nasty villain.”
James Mason, quoted in Roger Ebert, “James Mason: The Boys From Brazil”