Peregrinations 2007June4: News from Choctaw Ridge:
Another thing my brother and I tried to remember last weekend were the words to the song with the brain-wormy line "Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge." By coincidence, the song came up in a Metafilter post this week along with a link to Billie Gentry's original version. I love the Billie Gentry version with it's unsettling whiney quality and strange narrative but I think I actually prefer Joe Dassin's French version. (I've googled everywhere but I'm afraid I just can't find a link to give you an idea of what it sounds like). In a clever transposition, the young man Billie-Joe becomes a young French woman, Marie-Jeanne Guillaume, who throws herself off the "Pont de la Garonne" but like the original it never actually quite descends into the maudlin. One of the things I like is the way all of the cultural references are translated to a French context too:

It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay
C'était le quatre juin, le soleil tapait depuis le matin
Je m'occupais de la vigne et mon frère chargeait le foin

And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
"Well, Billy Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please"
Et mon père dit à ma mère en nous passant le plat de gratin :
"La Marie-Jeanne, elle n'était pas très maligne, passe-moi donc le pain".

"I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don't seem right"
Donne-moi encore un peu de vin, c'est bien injuste la vie

- Marie-Jeanne (French lyrics in full)


-Don't you love the way the apple pie in the original becomes wine in the French version? un peu de vin.
-I always just assumed it was a baby. Firstly, the lyric depicts the sort of southern society that doesn't look kindly on out-of-wedlock babies. And the grief of killing a baby would explain both Billy Joe's suicide and the narrator's attitude in telling the song. She turns sullen when she hears the news, her appetite vanishes, and the way she relates the conversation going on around her is sort of veiled by a diaphanous emotional haze.
It also strikes me that if the narrator weren't terribly involved in Billy Joe's suicide, she wouldn't be throwing flowers into the water a year later. The hindsight epilogue in the final verse illustrates the narrator's entire family unit breaking up since Billy Joe's death, symbolic of the family unit destruction in the original main act. yes, good.
-Well, I always thought it was a baby too but that was listening to the French version where it's a woman who jumps off the bridge. It's more difficult to believe that a man would feel that sort of remorse. I've never seen the film and the homosexual hypothesis had never occurred to me. So what were they throwing off the bridge in the film? His pink negligé, leather chaps and some gay porn?
-As though women have the market on remorse! (not that I'd know anything about it). In the movie he threw a ragdoll off the bridge. Symbolic of so many things, those ragdolls.
-I know, I know. Will no-one think of the men? I like this conversation...
Here are some other possibilities:
it was something they had stolen (eg. money from a bank, thereby nipping a Bonnie & Clyde saga in the bud)
it was a ring (they had been secretly engaged but the one who doesn't later jump off the bridge has broken it off)
it was a revolver (I can't think of a scenario for this one but when people throw something off a bridge in a film, it's almost always a revolver) funny.
it was a red herring well. okay I guess I can see how it seems like a question needing an answer, since the flowers are appropriate to mourning, maybe it is not as proper as it was natural to me to think they were throwing flowers when seen up there together. I just pictured it as innocent.
it was drugs (thus explaining why the protagonist is called Marie-Jeanne)
- Anonymous said... Hi Lesley, strangely enough, after our discussion regarding this song I too had been mulling it over in my head. So much so that I decided to conduct a small survey in the pub on Saturday evening just to see what the concensus of opinion was as to the reason for this tragedy. Intrestingly enough only 10% went with the baby theory, 5% went with the homosexual theory and the other 85% thought Billy-Joe McAllister was the player who missed the penalty against England in Euro 96. funny.
-Yes anonymous brother, but that still doesn't explain what they were throwing off the bridge that Sunday does it? (PS. I see there's a Bobbie Gentry duet with Johnny Cash on Youtube - right up your street.)