IT WAS AN ACCIDENT of timing that made Bobbie Gentry my second favourite singer. Second only to Dusty Springfield, which is as honourable and glorious a second placing as you can ask for, but second nonetheless.
Listening again at the weekend to The Girl From Chickasaw County, a massive box set of her Capitol recordings, it occurred to me that I may well have heard Bobbie first: I couldn’t tell you for sure, but it’s entirely possible that Ode To Billie Joe hit my ears before I Only Want to Be With You or Wishin’ And Hopin’, the Dusty songs that most likely cut through to pre-teen me in very suburban Chester Hill.
After all, I wasn’t judging what was seeping into my room down the back of 35 Robertson Road, from Edith Piaf and Jim Reeves (music played at “the front” that trickled through) to Abba and Al Martino, Sherbet and The Silver Platters (yes, the Brady Bunch “group” – shaddup already).
What I do know is that somewhere in my early teens, when Bacharach & David joined Lennon & McCartney and Elvis & Costello as my songwriting foundations – all blokes: I was some years yet from discovering the full splendours of Joni Mitchell and Jackie DeShannon, Kate Bush and Aimee Mann – Dusty Springfield became the point against which every other vocalist was measured, and against whom every other vocalist fell short in some way.
Why her? There is a lovely tone in that voice, of course; her phrasing is quite something; it is a marvellous instrument, and people who know things about things like how to sing can explain the technical aspects that almost certainly would have sailed over my head at the time. But that’s not what really did for me.
Yes, she often (but definitely not always) was singing some of the best songs around. Yes, someone so pivotal to me as Costello, who covered and revered Bacharach and David as much as he did Lennon and McCartney, clearly was a fan of hers. But for reasons that can in part be traced to my cultural training in chanson – see above to Piaf – and personal failing as an over-emotional boy, there was something in Dusty’s voice, something in the way, it seemed to me, she felt each tremor in a relationship, bared every open wound in her soul, and responded with every emotion she had had, that said this was the real thing.
And by real thing, I meant this was who I secretly suspected I was, and she was speaking for as much as to me.
By the time Bobbie Gentry surfaced in my consciousness as a whole career, albeit one done and packed away by 1982 and nary a sound since … By the time Billy Joe MacAllister’s jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge, and whether he and our possibly compromised narrator had or hadn’t thrown something off said bridge, was only one of her stories I was revelling in … By the time I realised her voice did the same things for me and the same things to me, as Dusty’s had … By the time I understood that my sweet spot, drawing from the musical twin sisters of soul and country, was where their pop music really thrived …
… well, I was deeply in love with it and making room for her alongside – if slightly behind, because a first love is beyond change – Dusty.
Not coincidentally, by this time as well, two more things had long ago entered the conversation about Bobbie and Dusty: sex and bastardy. And so much made sense – made more sense – about them, their choices, and what I was hearing.
In The Girl From Chickasaw County, the sensuality in her voice and delivery is the cornerstone of the best songs – the majority of which were written by her, marking the greatest contrast with Dusty. It’s not just sex underneath that sensuality, but admittedly that’s often there: her Morning Glory has the same just-woke-from-a-night-of-sex-ahead-of-a-morning-of-it sleepy seduction as Dusty’s Breakfast In Bed, so you know no one in the song is getting out from under the covers any time soon. The slow, deep and smooth Seasons Come, Seasons Go is packed with images of nature’s cycles that work as metaphors – “telling secrets in my eyes” as she puts it – varying from the subtle to the, well, not so subtle. "Lightning darts among the pines/Caught in a summer rainstorm/Soaking wet, I look upon the new plowed earth/With rivulets between each row.”
On the flipside, while the eventual toughness she exhibits is some consolation presumably, there isn’t any question about what it is that the brutish Joe Henry (who “I used to tease”) was doing when He Made A Woman Out Of Me: “I guess it served me right/Wasn’t long til he left me, cryin’ out in the night”. Principally though, the girl born Roberta Lee Streeter in Mississippi, brought an implied sense of comfort with and pleasure in sex which was not so easily discerned in the girl born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernardette O’Brien in London.
It helps, but it doesn’t take a Catholic upbringing to recognise in Dusty the heavy weight of guilt and repression that underpins her rich but conflicted approach to physical and emotional intimacy, and the pain beneath that. It’s hard enough being an Irish Catholic woman, but a lesbian one? In the ‘60s? Ooh boy. Sure that could add a frisson to any shenanigans, but realistically it was more likely to ruin it, or at best forestall lasting enjoyment.
No, what Bobbie had that painted sensuality through everything was the mix of warmth, intensity, humour, intimacy, knowingness, wit and, importantly, ease with being in control that makes for the most sensual of experiences.
It’s there from the first husky, almost growled notes she sings in the steamy, funky, self-penned Mississippi Delta, the opening track of her debut. And it is no less evident 176 songs later, in the smooth, wordless slide over the playout of Circle ‘Round The Sun, the traditional song that ends her BBC live performances and closes out the box.
It’s as natural, as comfortable, as innate as the playful childhood nods in the lively Papa Won’t You Let Me Go To Town With You, the tough-willed defiance in Fancy’s slinky groove, or the observance of grief and innocence in conflict in the lightly solemn Recollection. It’s as empathetic as the close-quarters folk of Jessye Lisabeth, a lyric that could easily have been directed at Dusty (“What secret are you keeping/Jessye Lisabeth, pray tell/What could cause such bitter tears/What lesson has life taught you?”) and as relaxed in its skin as the lightly lush, ever so gently psychedelic Marigolds And Tangerines.
And it may explain why she gave up her career after little more than a decade as corporate men decided she should sing more songs by other – male, naturally - writers, sound less earthy and sonically adventurous, and make a duet album with Glen Campbell that essentially relegated her to backing vocalist. Ah, but that’s a story for another day.
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