"Ode to Billie Joe" is a 1967 song written and recorded by Bobbie Gentry (born July 27, 1944), a singer-songwriter from Chickasaw County, Mississippi. The single, released in late July, was a number-one hit in the United States, and became a big international seller. The song is ranked #419 on Rolling Stone's list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time". The recording of "Ode to Billie Joe" generated eight Grammy nominations, resulting in three wins for Gentry and one win for arranger Jimmie Haskell.
This song has sold over 3 million copies worldwide.
Read more about Ode To Billie Joe: Plot, Recording, Covers, Adaptations, Translations, Parodies
Famous quotes containing the words ode to, ode and/or joe:
“I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The ode lives upon the ideal, the epic upon the grandiose, the drama upon the real.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)